


Always and everywhere

by FeedMeHardy



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: F/F, Mostly TTW the book with a little film and a bunch of my own nonsense, The Time Traveler's Wife AU, Time Travel, We've got fluff we've got angst we've got sheer melodrama it's all happening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:53:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26123032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeedMeHardy/pseuds/FeedMeHardy
Summary: Héloïse is six years old when she first meets a naked Marianne, who is thirty-six, in the meadow behind her house. They are both twenty-eight and fully clothed when Marianne meets Héloïse for the first time, in the library where Héloïse works.Time travel shenanigans and heartbreak based on The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
Relationships: Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 131
Kudos: 142





	1. Chapter 1

I'm six years old when I first meet Marianne. When she appeared naked in the meadow behind the house. "Hello Héloïse, how are you today?" she asked, smiling. I did not reply. "Do you have any clothes for me?" The look on my face must have been enough. "I'm so sorry," she said. "Have we not met? I'm Marianne." She sat with her knees up over her chest, a strange concertina that I recognize so well now. 

This is solved by the rolled-up blanket under my arm. I had gone down to the meadow to read by myself, but this is far more interesting. She wraps herself up in it and I read to her instead. It's nice. Comfortable, even though nothing about it should have been. 

After a while, she said, "I'm going to disappear very soon. But I had a lovely time. Is it OK if I come back again?" I think I nodded, I hope I did, and she disappeared, which was fascinating. 

...

When I meet Héloïse for the first time I'm twenty-eight and at the library, looking for a book on woodcuts. The guy at the front desk says, "Héloïse will help you with that," pointing over his shoulder at a woman with her back to us and while I'm busy thinking what a lovely name that is, and am about to move onto admiring the hair, there's a great huffing and puffing from her and a complaint that she's in the middle of something, but she turns around and looks at me and the world stops. I am vaguely aware of the stopping, but she drops the book she was holding and her eyes are wide and she says my name like it's beautiful, like it means something, like I mean something.

This is very encouraging to me, at the time, because I realize that future-Marianne has really outdone herself here. Little did I know. 

She comes over to me, her hands out like she wants to touch me, but she doesn't. I would not have complained. "You look..." she starts to say, but doesn't finish.

"Younger?" I offer.

She smiles, a sort of relief. "Yes. You don't know me, I know, I understand. My name's Héloïse. I've known you since I was a girl."

"And you know why I don't know you?"

She looks around, takes my hand like it's nothing, pulls me into the stacks. "You time travel," she says. "Yes, I know."

"OK," I say, immediately completely willing to turn everything over to her. It's the brisk, no-nonsense, suffer-no-fools air. Intimidating, but extremely attractive. It made me feel safe. 

"How are you?" she asks me, still looking at me with wonder.

I say, "I'm good," because in that moment I really am and I forget being exhausted and broke and all the other shitty aspects of my life. "How are you?" I return, though my delivery is more stilted and unsure.

"I'm good," she replies, absolutely beaming at me and I feel weak in the knees. I hope I'm not going to travel because I'm enjoying myself and even though she seems to know about the traveling that would be a lot for having been acquainted all of two minutes.

She's still looking at me like that. "I can't believe I finally get to ask this... would you like to have dinner with me tonight? We can talk about everything then."

For a moment I had forgotten she is at work, that we are whispering in a very quiet, very public place. "Yes," I say, way too fast. "Yes, that would be great."

"Do you know Beau Thai? It's not far from here."

I love Thai food. "Yeah, yes, sure."

"Seven?"

"Great, sounds great."

She looks me up and down, studies my face. "I can't believe you are finally here," she says, then seems to pull herself together. "I'll see you tonight."

"Yes," I say and smile and she smiles and I manage to make my feet move me away, out of the library, forgetting about the book and everything other than that smile. 

...

My very first time travel is aged six. My sixth birthday, in fact. I went to the museum with my parents and we ate at a restaurant and I'm exhausted, which is important because that's going to become a very recognizable trigger for me. But I'm happy and thinking about sneaking out of the house to go back to the museum on my own... when I am there. 

I'm naked in the middle of the art gallery. There's a piano at one end, the one my mother had played earlier that day. People had stopped to watch, not knowing they were getting a free performance from one of Paris' leading concert pianists. I am very dramatically sick. 

Then a woman is behind me. "It's OK," she says. "Don't worry."

"About the sick?" I reply. 

She smiles. "About anything." I thought how much she looked like my mother and remembering that now is a little pang every time. She looked like my father too and I tried to puzzle it out. 

"My name is Marianne," she says. 

"Mine too."

"Really? That's wonderful." She holds out a shirt for me, she's wearing the same. Now, of course, I know I stole them from the gift shop. It has the museum logo on and is several sizes too large so we could wear them like nightgowns. 

At the time I thought this Marianne was so calm and confident. By the time it was my turn to be the older one I was scared shitless I was going to irredeemably mess this up, even though I hadn't. The pressure, though. 

We went around the art gallery together and I told myself all about the paintings. We played piano together. My younger self disappeared first, luckily, and, ending up back in bed, I thought it must have been a dream.

... 

I see Marianne again for the first time. It's strange, I know any day now could be the day, I am _longing_ for that day, but when I turn and it's her I panic. I think, please not today, my hair looks awful, my apartment is a mess, I haven't learned Mandarin or done half the things I told myself I would by the time she arrived, I'm not ready.

And she is so charming, takes it so in her stride despite the fool I make of myself. 

When Marianne leaves the library I am seized with a fear, however irrational, that something will happen and I won't see her again. It's been eight years, like she had said it would be, but what if it isn't _now_ , what if I lose her again and, having come so close, have to wait more months. It would be torture. I didn't get her number, have no contingency plan.

Still, I hurry out into the stairwell and look out the window. Presently, she emerges from below me and walks a little way into the square. Then she stops, turns, looks back at the building and I'm sure she can't see me, but I raise my hand anyway. She doesn't wave back, can't see me, turns after a moment and continues walking. She tips her head back, is breathing deep and I know the exact look that will be on her face. Know that she will now swing her arms... and she does. She does this when she is happy. 

Everything about Marianne is seared into my memory. For the last twenty-two years my whole life has revolved around her. And she has no idea who I am.

...

Until now the only person I have ever met from my future is myself. Until Héloïse and part of me already understands how important this is. She's known me since she was young, so in my future I will travel to her childhood and we will interact, not just interact, she will know about the time traveling and will care enough to be happy to see me, in her future, in the library, today. And now we are going to have dinner.

Shit, I think. I am in no way prepared for this. I am blundering into this situation blind and I know, with the utmost certainty, that I am going to mess it up. There's no way this can go right for me. Except, I take a breath and remind myself, somehow, somewhere in time, it already has gone right enough that we found ourselves here. 

I look in my closet and try to think if I dare wear one of my favorite shirts. Dare I risk traveling and my clothes being left in a pile in Paris somewhere to get thrown in the garbage? I decide against it. Black shirt, black jeans, off the stack of identical items. Generic, cheap, bought in bulk. I get through a lot of clothes, never mind all the traveling Mariannes who arrive here needing something to wear. 

Daring, also, to think that perhaps Héloïse will understand. That knowing about the time travel she might understand why I also dress oddly, why I am sometimes late if not entirely absent and drop off the grid for days at a time, why I lead such a chaotic and unpredictable life. 

I don't know when or where it's going to happen, I don't know when or where it's going to take me. I don't know how long I will be there, or how much time will have passed here while I am away. I just know the sinking, lightheaded feeling, then that I am naked on the floor, somewhere, sometime, alone. 

...

Thankfully all goes to plan and we meet outside the restaurant. My nerves have been rattling all afternoon. We're both ten minutes early. 

"Good day?" Marianne asks me as she holds the door open. I think she must be joking, but I can hardly tell her it's the best day of my life, that I have been waiting for today for so long. 

None of that is suitable, however. "Long," I say with a little smile, it's as much as I will give her. Every minute stretched like an hour as I waited to be here. "I had to give a talk to some of the members."

"Do you do that a lot?" 

"We have a rota. No one wants to." I look at her. I realize that until today I have never seen her in her own clothes. Always something borrowed, that I had given her. I feel a pang of sadness for the cardigan that is hidden away at the back of my closet. But she looks good, she looks so good. 

She laughs. "You're a good advertisement."

"You weren't thinking of becoming one? I can tell you, you're at least thirty years too young." God, she is _so young_. 

"Do you like your job?"

I think about it. Give it due consideration. She taught me that. "Yes. I do."

We are seated and handed menus, but are just staring at one another.

"What do you do?" and I start on the questions because I am desperate for anything of her. Also aware that the last time I saw her, before today, eight years ago in the meadow, she had reminded me that when we met she wouldn't know me, and asked me to be gentle with her. 

She looks surprised. "You don't know?"

"Oh, because I knew you? Goodness, no, you hardly told me anything about yourself or the future."

"Huh," she says. "Well, I guess I'm an artist."

Of course you are, my heart sings. My patient, arts and crafts-encouraging, thoughtful, whimsical artist. Always looking, always seeing things in new ways, of course you are an artist, how perfect of you. 

I should have guessed, but she did so many things so well, with so much passion. 

Something in her doesn't sit quite right though. "Why do you 'guess'?" I ask. 

She is embarrassed, that little huff of a laugh, looking off to the side. "It's not going too well. I should probably think about getting a real job. Except, for some reason," she smiles wryly, we have a shared joke already, "I don't seem to be able to hold down a real job. Probably all the disappearing."

"Don't quit," I say, quickly, vehemently. That's not insider information, I just believe in her. "I'm sure you are amazing."

Which makes her blush and she starts asking about me and what I like to do, my interests, and I want to tell her to hush. That the last thing I want to do is talk about myself, I only want to talk about her. I am aware it would come off like an interrogation, though. I am trying my best to be as normal as I am capable of being. I work hard to remember that she doesn't, in fact, know all this about me. This Marianne does not know my favorite books, we haven't already read them together. She doesn't know what I did at college or what high school was like or about where I grew up. Not yet. And she is so kind and attentive, of course she wants to know these things about me.

There is reciprocation. Finally, I find out where she was all those years that she refused to tell me. Growing up in Paris and at college barely half an hour away from me. All this time she was right there. 

"Your parents?" I ask. When I was little and Marianne was an adult it didn't occur to me that she had parents. Until I began to understand that as well as being my visitor she also existed, the same age as me, elsewhere in the world. Going to school, having parents, doing all the same things I did. 

"Musicians," she says. "At the Philharmonie. Well, my dad is kind of retired now. And my mom... she died."

"When?" I breathe. 

"When I was six." She says if off-hand, practised, having had to tell people fairly often I suppose, is used to the reactions. But none of them are my reaction, that all this time I had no idea. All the times I railed against her and she never let on.

"I'm so sorry. When my father died..." and she looks at me, pained, but I continue, "I had you."

"I'm sorry," she says. This constant apology is deeply familiar to me. 

"You were wonderful."

She looks bewildered. "Was I? I don't feel like I would be."

"I'm telling you too much. You were so gentle with me about the future. Now I am being the opposite."

"No, it's nice." 

I'm concerned this conversation is getting very serious very fast. In my childhood we never shied from big conversations. She would talk to me about anything I wanted. Never tell me I was too young or too old, or it was silly. She doesn't know that though. Poor Marianne. This must be so incredibly strange for her. 

"It's nice to think I got some things right," she continues. 

"You do, always." I'm alarmed by her self-deprecation, but then she is alarmed by my alarm. 

I want to tell her she is, was, will be, the most wonderful person. 

I'm usually much better on dates than this. Cool and detached and girls seem to really like that until it's six months later and I'm still cool and detached because they aren't Marianne, so what does it matter. Then they dump me and tell me I'm a psychopath. But now it _is_ Marianne, now it _does_ matter and I am losing it. I don't even know if this is a date, I don't even know if Marianne does, can, will like me. 

"I'm sorry," she says again.

I inch my hand across the table and she watches it coming, then moves to meet it. She looks at me, amazed. 

"It's a lot," I say. "But there's no rush. We've got time." And for the first time I realize how true that is. Yes, she will travel, she will disappear, but this is where she will return, to the present. To the present where she told me we were friends. Where we have so much time. 

... 

My second time travel is a little different. I'm in the car with my mother. It's Christmas Eve and we are driving to the airport to pick up my father. Then the plan is to go on to my grandparents house for Christmas. I'm excited, wriggling in the front seat. She is too, singing along with the Christmas songs on the radio, tapping on the wheel. I look at her, grinning. She looks back at me and smiles. The tail lights from the truck ahead light up her face. Her attention is back on the road, concentrating through the snow. 

We pass the intersection and I know this now as more than a six-year-old, I have seen it again and again from every angle, a car comes on too fast and clips the back of ours. At the same time, a few cars ahead, someone overtakes too close, starting a chain reaction of braking. The truck in front of us brakes hard and between the snow and the momentum from the car hitting us from behind we sail into the back of it. I remember my mother pumping the brakes and I'm looking at her as a piece of the sheet metal the truck is carrying slides off, through the windscreen and I travel. Minutes later I reappear on the grass verge, naked, with a slight cut on my forehead. 

It takes so long for the police and ambulances and fire crew to make it through the traffic. Up on the grass verge, I put a blanket over the six-year-old Marianne's shoulders and wait with her for the police. The scene, should anyone stop and really look, is crawling with the same dark-haired woman of various ages. Another me calls the airport to tell my father to go to the hospital. Another me helps direct traffic. These things I can do. On the periphery. 

Another me tries to stop the car coming on at the ramp. Another me is in a call box trying to phone the house, warn my mother not to leave. None of these attempts ever work. It's my practice in determinism. That I am dragged through time again and again only to watch. Never to change. 

... 

Nice-ness was important to me as a child because very little in the rest of my life was. So when I say Marianne was 'nice' it is not damning with faint praise. Her visits became touchstones for me. 

I could get through the weeks, the months, between because I knew she was coming. That I would be basking in the warmth of her soothing presence. That she would listen to me as I spilled all my angsts and drama. Some so mundane, some actually objectively awful. It's hard when your age is in single digits to tell the difference, a slight at school and my parent's hideous fights assuming the same importance. But she listened the same to them all. All were as important to her as they were to me. 

She treated me as an equal in all the right ways, never belittling or pulling rank or demeaning my concerns. But never as an adult entirely, there was never any reciprocation, which I didn't notice until I was older, she never laid on more than I could handle, she allowed me to be the child I was, childish, celebrating that. 

She was nice and safe and comfortable and that meant everything to me.

When I was not unloading my little tales of woe she helped me with my homework, listened to me read or read to me. We sat on the meadow or walked in the woods behind it. We built a den there and made tracings of the bark, watched ants marching, bees collecting pollen, for hours. The summer I was ten she ended up staying for three whole days and we camped down there, she made a fire and I brought food down from the house and it was the best vacation I ever had. 

In the winter or bad weather it was the room in the basement between the boiler room and the laundry room, barely more than a storage closet. Marianne always arrived in the meadow and had to trek up to the house in rain or snow, wrapped in a raincoat left under the large stone.

I put it about that this was my Reading Room and none of the family cared one way or the other and left me to it. I did indeed fill it with books, and spare clothes, and when Marianne was arriving I would leave food ready if I couldn't be there myself.

Her visits were predicted in a little notebook. A long list of dates and times that came to hold a sacred importance to me. The second time she materialized in the meadow, I'm sure barely a week after the first, she asked if she could borrow it and sat, brow furrowed in concentration, writing it all out. So I would know when she was coming.

"But how do you know?" I ask her.

She smiles. "When you are older and we are friends, you give me this book. You're very smart like that." 

Eventually, the Reading Room started to fill up with mementoes, treasures, to me. The fruits of our labours collected there. Funny stones we found, birds nests from the orchard. Projects we worked on together like pressing flowers from mama's garden, marbling a book cover for stories I had written, models made out of twigs and moss, a terrarium. No-one else spent hours with me, totally engrossed, like that. 

Even when I was a teenager I kept them all. Childish and inconsequential, yes. But they mattered to me. The memories of them mattered to me. Some spilled up into my bedroom over time. Some are here in our apartment now.

When she wasn't there I would read or work on something to show her, something I knew she would be proud of. She was always impressed and proud and asked all the right questions about my projects. Or I would rediscover the treasures. Carefully go over them, spend an hour looking at a leaf because she could. 

Sometimes I put on the clothes that stayed in there for her. They were not good clothes, they were acquired because they were on their way out of the house in bags for donation to charity, mostly. 

Her favorite, consequently my favorite, was a chunky cardigan that had been given to my father but that he had never worn. It had lapels and patches on the elbows and it was too big for her so that she could wrap it around her right under both arms. 

When I was little I would put it on and be incapable even of reading it swamped me so much. Or I would nap underneath it. It smelled of her, soon enough, though I probably wore it more than she ever did. It felt like it smelled of her. 

The fact that she arrived naked and then disappeared with very little warning, that every time she came she was a little bit different, younger, older, younger again, remembered different things that we did last time she was here, that time travel existed only in stories, certainly not in the real world... none of that seemed to matter to me. She was just Marianne. 

... 

Astonishingly, after the dismal performance I gave, Héloïse asks me, after our dinner, if I have plans on Sunday. She has Sundays and Mondays off as her weekend so this means she wants to spend her next available free time with me. I never have any plans so I don't even have to think before agreeing. She suggests the park and I understand it's because she knows I like being outside in the fresh air. 

When we say goodbye there's a lingering and I realize she doesn't know what to do. I don't either, but I think this whole situation is probably much stranger for her than it is for me. So I put my hand on her arm, kiss her cheek. Her eyes, the way she looks at me as I pull away. She's happy and it feels so good. 

On Sunday we walk through the park in the occasional drizzle, wandering from under one tree to another. She stops and runs her finger over the patterns in the bark or twirls a leaf in her fingers and I've never seen someone take such fascination in things so small that it makes me feel completely normal in doing it too. I find myself able to behave as I would if I were alone, but I'm not alone.

We talk and talk. I'm telling her about something nerdy and stupid and she laughs. I say, "I'm sorry, do you already know?" and she smiles at me and says, "Tell me again," because it's me, I already told her. I don't have to watch what I'm saying all the time in case I let something slip, I can talk about this whole part of me that I have never spoken to anyone else about. I don't talk about it, really, but it means I can share other things that would make no sense if it weren't for the time traveling. 

I can hardly find the words for my first impressions of Héloïse. She's intimidating and gentle, a formidable intellect and totally openminded, as forthright about some things as she is guarded about others. 

We walk so close we keep bumping shoulders, our hands brush together until at one point they don't separate and our fingers fit tight together. Later we get hot chocolates and do a circuit around the lake and the sun starts to set. We've been out here hours and I could stay here with her, just walking and talking, all night. 

We come to a stop at some picturesque viewpoint, but I'm not looking at the lake, I'm looking at her and the sunbursts shining in her eyes. 

She looks at me too, so carefully. "Was this alright?" she asks. "Not too weird?"

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to answer that. "Not at all. I'm having an amazing time." Am still having, I am not willing for this to be over yet. 

"I keep thinking I'm going to scare you off." She looks down at our hands, which are still twisting together. 

"You couldn't," I tell her because goodness knows enough strange things have happened in my life and this is strange in the most wonderful way. "I've been wanting to kiss you all day."

She exhales, somewhere between relief and surprise. "I've been wanting to kiss you half my life." She's about to get annoyed with herself, for scaring me again.

Until I lean closer. "Kiss me, then."

She does _not_ need telling twice. Her fingers run up my arms, my eyes close, her thumbs go along my jaw, my breath falters, her hand come to rest on the back of my neck and draws me closer. She kisses me and I feel the shockwaves everywhere. 

...

I'm 14 and giddy with the prospect of seeing Marianne tonight. It's only been a few weeks and was only a few weeks before that, but the frequency is exciting, rather than making it feel commonplace. Somehow I think it's because Marianne _wants_ to be here more, with me. Even though I have the dates, so know it's not true, I imagine the time in between getting shorter and shorter until she is here every day. Then all the time, just here all the time and how lovely that would be. 

According to the notebook, it will be 10pm. A late-night visit is inconvenient, but workable. At this point, all eyes are on my elder sister, Alicia, and her misbehavior, so I can do pretty much whatever I want. A late-night visit with attendant sneaking around also feels more scandalous and exciting. Even though Marianne has ended up sleeping over in the Reading Room before, it's not that unusual. 

So I'm sat in class, staring off into space, planning how I will organize this. Go down to the meadow to meet her? Just wait for her in the Reading Room? Which Marianne will it be? My mind is too busy with excitement to actually decide and I drift from making plans to just imagining how it might unfold. 

Imagining how I will be sat in the Reading Room and she will open the door and smile at me. I can see it so clearly in my mind in that moment. Her face, her smile, her eyes, her lips, my mind is as vast as the universe and it is all Marianne and I'm falling until I'm back in my chair at my desk and I think, oh. Oh, this is what everyone is always talking about. This is what all the songs are about. This is what they mean. 

By the evening I am curiously calm about it. I don't know why I didn't notice it earlier. Perhaps because everything to do with Marianne was already so unusual that this didn't seem all that strange. Perhaps because it was Marianne, who I had looked up to and hero-worshipped and adored for so long already that this had just slipped in alongside that without my noticing. Perhaps I was so desperate I was just crushing on the only person that looked at me, that cared about me. Perhaps it was inevitable because she was so lovely and beautiful and mysterious. Perhaps it was all those things. Perhaps it didn't matter why, it just was. 

I stand at the basement door and watch a dark shape coming over the lawn, avoiding the spots of light from the house. She skirts the building and then she's here, smiling, asking me how I am, wearing the raincoat from the bag down in the meadow, looking as beautiful, no, _more_ beautiful, than anything I ever conjured to mind earlier in the day. 

She goes to the Reading Room and changes and I go up to the kitchen to retrieve the enormous plate of sandwiches I made her, along with a pint of milk. When I get back she is wearing her favorite cardigan and looking at my geography project I just so happened to have left on the coffee table. I eat a sandwich, she has the rest, she is at the younger, hungrier end of all my Mariannes. She asks me earnestly about the project, about what I am reading, about school, what interesting things I have been doing. 

I don't go up to bed until midnight and only then because she insists. It's only been two hours and it seems a waste, when she is here, to leave her, but I do. 

"Good night," she smiles, curled up under a blanket, reading with the little lamp, and it all seems so normal and totally bizarre at the same time. 

"Good morning," she smiles again when I creep down at 5.30 like a kid at Christmas.

"Did you sleep OK?"

"Like a bug in a rug," and she looks very content, stretching her legs out. 

"Cereal?"

"Mm, please."

I go the whole hog and get a tray with our bowls and juice and fruit and pastries.

"Wow," she says when I get back. "Thank you."

We eat our breakfast together, companionably munching away and I think, I want to do this every day with you. It is, compared to thoughts I will have about Marianne in the years to come, an achingly simple fantasy. 

I don't want to go to school, could easily fake illness, spend all day here with Marianne, or as long as she has. Except of course she won't hear of it and I don't put up a fight, still blindsided and in awe of my revelation, I can't bear to cross her. I will grow out of this, unfortunately.

So I make more sandwiches then go to school and when I get back Marianne is gone. Her book is on the floor, she's lost her place. This, somehow, is overwhelmingly sad to me. I put it on the table, waiting for her. I wash the plate, tidy away her clothes, do my homework, waiting for her. 

...

I meet myself a lot. Sometimes it's me from next week. Sometimes it's me as a kid. Once we got three of us together and went out to dinner and no-one knew how to look at us. One time, when I was sixteen and she arrived in my bedroom from next March, we made out. Weird, but inevitable and not repeated. 

I had to teach myself all the survival skills. Lockpicking, Dumpster Diving, Pickpocketing, Foraging, Breaking and Entering, Effective Ways To Put A Man Down So He Stays Down and, the real favorite, How To Tell What Roadkill You Can Eat Without Poisoning Yourself. A varied curriculum on surviving when you turn up naked and ravenously hungry sometime, anytime. With no idea how long it will be until you go back to your present. Some of the things you have to do, I'm not proud of them. And you have to survive that, too. This is not the person I want to be, but it's the person I have to be, more often than I would like. 

Then there are the triggers. No alcohol or caffeine, I tell myself before she goes to college. She does not listen. No television, I tell my six-year-old self. She listens eventually. The light, the flashing, the intensity of it sets the traveling off. I have to get enough sleep. Tiredness is a big one, as is stress. I tell myself this like I have it all figured out. I do not. 

The older I get the further my travels take me. When I am six I travel back to the same day and am there for a few hours at most. By my teens I am traveling years and on two occasions into the future. Future travel is a rarity, but gets more common. I'm 32 when I first travel beyond my birth. The furthest I have traveled so far is back to 1921. 

Eventually, I had to be disabused of the notion that this co-time traveling friend, companion, aunt-like figure, was any of these things. When she told me I was nine and we were looking in the mirror together and she showed me we were the same person, just thirty years apart. The loneliness, that there was only myself. Knowing this responsibility was coming. It was awful, and it was awful doing it. More awful to be told.

But nor can I tell my younger self that I won't always be alone. That I will meet a woman so extraordinary I will love her for decades outside of time. I have been in 1921 with my love for Héloïse keeping me going despite the fact her parents haven't even been born yet. That she will always be with me and always out there somewhere loving me. That she is my anchor. That, once I meet her, I will never _feel_ alone. 

That in some ways this makes travelling harder. The added complications of missing her, worrying about her. That it is worth it, to me, the pain and sacrifice, in order to have her in my life. 

That I will always be haunted by the fear it is not worth it, _I_ am not worth it, on balance, for her. That really, pragmatically, the scales do not tip in my favor and the harm to her outweighs any good I can bring. But that I love her as fiercely as I am able, with every moment of her that I have. Which is all any of us can do.


	2. Chapter 2

Héloïse has taken me out on a very important mission, which is exactly how she phrases it, a 'mission', to meet her flatmate Sophie, a friend since college. I have been well-briefed. There have been a lot of warnings. Apparently I am to ignore anything Sophie says about the special blend incident because it is not true. There are also many advance apologies in the likelihood Sophie says something inappropriate. This is then amended to, "Or many inappropriate things, more likely." 

Obviously my nerves are running a little high. We are going to a bar, which I generally do not. I am meeting someone important, who I need to win over, I feel. I really do not want to travel and mess this up. I haven't since I met Héloïse two weeks ago and while that's not the longest I've ever gone without traveling it's certainly more than average. In general, I try not to worry too much about the traveling because worry and stress is a good guarantee it will happen. But I really do not want to now. 

Also, I am with Héloïse on a date. Which is a strange mix of feeling the most understood and safe that I ever have in my life, so comfortable and companionable versus a terrified awe of her, shot through with shocking amounts of lust. I haven't spent much time with Héloïse with other people in the mix, but I am aware she is an entirely different person, such as when I first met her at the library and felt she was ready to eviscerate me for disturbing her, until she knew it was me. 

Héloïse is pounced on and when they separate I am being scrutinised very seriously. 

"Marianne," Héloïse says and she sounds so proud and happy that I am melting, "this is Sophie. Sophie, Marianne."

I try to smile. "Good to meet you."

Sophie squints at me and I know that look. She is trying to place me, but I have clothes on so she is struggling. "Yeah, you too," she says. "Drinks!"

"I'll get them," I say, so that I can go to the bar myself and be discreet about this. 

"Nonsense! Héloïse, usual?"

Héloïse glances at me, she's checking it's OK and it's so sweet of her. 

"You go ahead." 

"A red wine, then," Héloïse says. "Marianne doesn't drink."

"Just water," I say. 

Sophie looks between us. She thinks I am an alcoholic. This is going very badly. The music isn't even that loud, but it pounds in my head. All the conversations, all the bodies, the heat... 

Héloïse nudges me over to the tables, not that any are free. I want to hold her hand, want to make contact, but a quick survey of the room makes me realize that would be a bad idea. I stand as close to her as I think I can get away with. A finger grazes the back of my hand. She knows. 

"Thank you for coming," Héloïse says, so low it sounds like she's whispering. "I spent so long having to hide you away. Now I finally get to show you off."

"Show me... what?" I cannot imagine what she could mean. 

Sophie is back and I'd love to know how she got through the crowd at the bar that quick. I would later learn it's all about the elbows. 

"You're a cheap date at least," Sophie says, handing me my glass. "Not that that's a problem for Héloïse."

Héloïse thumps her. 

Sophie continues. "Héloïse said you were an artist."

Now Héloïse beams at me and it's lovely but, I think, unearned. "Complete with a draughty garret," I say. Because there's nothing else I can say, this is always the problem. Losing commissions because I disappear for days at a time, miss deadlines, miss pitches, miss phonecalls. Bad for business, but there's no way to explain it, really, without time travel. To editors, to agents, to clients, to Sophie right now. I'm being to feel too warm, lightheaded. 

"I have to..." and I incline myself toward the door.

"Of course," Héloïse says.

Once I'm outside and round the corner I stand against the wall, inhale. When I open my eyes she's there. I'm surprised, then feel bad being surprised because it's just the sort of thing she would do. She doesn't say anything, she just waits for me. 

"I'm sorry," I say and she tips her head at me. "I'm not much fun."

"You are _so_ much fun. What are you worried about?" She knows, she knows where my mind is going and she runs a hand over my hair. 

"I'm worried about traveling, in there, with all those people and Sophie, but also, in general, I'd prefer not to. I'm worried about what it takes to not travel, not drinking and not going out and how that makes me no fun. So, everything, basically."

She kisses me so gently. "Don't worry," she says. "We'll figure it out."

And, for the first time in my life, there is a we. 

...

It's a hot August and I'm ten, back to school next week and I'm mad about it. I've been having such a good summer I want it to go on forever. I won't be able to explain it to anyone, though. All my friends will talk about their vacation and I won't know what to say. 

"What if you're just my imaginary friend?" I ask Marianne, who is having her post-arrival meal of leftovers I brought down for her. 

"Would that be so bad?"

Quite bad, yes. But imaginary friends don't eat so much real food or wear real clothes.

"Why do you think I'm not real?" She finishes the food and puts the fork in the box. "Thank you for that, I love Thai, it's my favorite."

"Mama was saving it."

Marianne blanches.

"But she's been mean."

Now I can't decide whether to complain about Mama or continue investigating Marianne's realness. There might be time for both, there might not.

I give her a quick poke. She's real like that, I know, I've touched her before. She's not some sort of ghost, she does real things. Like now, she pokes me back and I laugh.

"Let's get dessert," she says and we go to the orchard and she reaches the biggest apples and lifts me up so I can too.

"Time travel isn't real," I tell her. "It's just stories and they usually use machines." She looks at me. "I've been reading a lot of time travel stories," I admit.

"There are lots of things people think aren't real, but later turn out to be."

"Like what?"

"Well, like what?"

"Like... the earth being round?"

"Yes, an excellent example." She's so pleased and it feels rude to be doubting her existence any more. 

We take off our shoes and socks and paddle in the stream, picking the brambles that hang over the bank and eating them, leaving my hands stained purple, and watching the bees, butterflies and insects. 

"We should make a bug hotel, so you can watch them get ready to sleep in the winter," she says. "Would you like that?"

I nod.

"That's your mission, then, before next time. Get some good twigs together and tell me we are going to make a bug hotel."

I don't really want to think about next time, even if we do have a fun mission, because I don't want to think about this time being over. I don't want to go back to the house where Papa doesn't come down for dinner and Alicia argues with Mama and gets sent to her room and then I have to finish dinner with Mama ignoring me. 

"Don't drink water out of streams," Marianne tells me. "But if you must drink water out of streams..." and she tells me all about what to look for and how to filter it and I can't imagine ever needing to know this, but I am fascinated.

She's so smart and she must be real because I don't know any of that. "Or am I _your_ imaginary friend?"

"A good question," she says. "How do we know what is real? So asks thousands of years of philosophical inquiry."

"What's philosophical inquiry?" and I can see the 'whoops' register on her face, without any understanding why.

"Philosophy, it's a discipline, like history or math, it's about questions about life."

"You can study it like math?"

"You can," she says gently.

"Will it tell me about what's real and about time travel and stuff?"

"It'll help you think about those things." She splashes water toward me. "Race you down to the big stone."

"What do I get if I win?"

"What do you want?"

I want you to stay. "You have to read to me."

"Deal."

I win, more nimble through the water than she is, though I struggle on the bank, somehow I make it to the big stone in the meadow first. It's too hot to sit there so we go into the woods to the den we built last time she was here, but she doesn't remember and is very impressed by it, asking me lots of questions. 

She reads to me and eats chips from the bag I left down here and I lean up against her and I can't hold onto being awake, no matter how much I want to. 

Like a dream, then, I remember my head on her shoulder as she walks and a moment later I'm rolling over on the futon in the Reading Room, disturbed because Alicia is banging on the door shouting about dinner and Marianne's sat on the floor next to me with a book. I ignore Alicia and watch Marianne until I'm waking up again and she's not there anymore, just a book and her clothes. Like a dream. 

...

Héloïse cooks me dinner at her apartment, which is large and full of books and has paint peeling off the walls. It's also not particularly tidy, which she blames on Sophie, who is out and cannot defend herself.

There are proper napkins on the table and a candle. This is all very new to me. 

She is really very good at cooking. "Where did you learn to cook like this?" I ask her. 

"From you," she says offhandedly. 

"There is no way, no matter how far in the future, that I can cook like this."

"But can you be sure?" She is smiling, teasing me. "From the cook at home."

I cough. "You have a cook?"

"And a housekeeper," she says, like a confession. "I also... have a trust fund."

"OK," I say, not sure what to do with the information, but understanding why she feels she needs to say it.

So while we eat she tells me about where she grew up, her family's estate near Saint-Malo. The house has a name, Meadowlark. It is a _named_ house. When she had previously referred to the meadow behind the house I assumed she had meant a field, beyond the garden, but was thinking far too small. The meadow is a part of the grounds, next to the orchard, there are also woods. Closer to the house are more formal gardens, her mother's beloved flowers.

She tells me about her childhood adventures picking brambles, identifying butterflies, building a bird box, playing conkers. 

"Sounds lovely," I say.

"It was, it really was."

But she seems sad about it now. Her dad, I assume. I put my hand over hers and her face lights up again.

"This is so nice," I tell her. "Thank you." 

She leans over me to collect my plate and I stop her, kiss her. The kissing gets a bit heated and I move her into my lap, she's holding my face, my hands are on her back, keeping her close. 

She pulls away, lips swollen, breathless, strokes her hands over my face. She's beautiful, powerful. "Do you think it's time we retire to the bedroom?" she pants. 

"If you're sure, are you sure?"

"I am, I am, are you?" 

"Yes, yes," and we whisper and gasp reassurances to each other as we stumble, still kissing, into Héloïse's bedroom. 

Onto her bed, clothes scattering with abandon. I am desperate for her. 

She tugs off my tee, dispenses with my bra and I assume she has seen all this already, but she looks at me with wide eyes all the same. 

She leans back, starts undoing her shirt, I kiss her stomach as it is revealed little by little, kiss her chest, push her shirt off, my hands brush over her bra, making her moan. Once her bra has gone too she pulls me against her, just our skin, our warmth, the thundering heartbeats, the heaving breath. We stay like that, close and just holding each other. Until one of us shifts a little and the friction is unbearable and we are ignited again, kissing and rolling and grasping. 

"Did you know?" I whisper to her. "That we were going to do this?"

"No," she replies, with some difficulty. "I imagined... I thought... oh God, oh Marianne..." as though God and I were equals in this endeavor. 

Which is that I am currently trailing my fingers over her underwear and her back is arching and I kiss her neck. She fumbles her underwear off and I run my fingers through her hair and she growls, pushing herself up onto my hand. She is outrageously wet and I am almost undone by it, too turned on to function and struggling to get a grip on her. I think about going down on her, but she kisses me and moves against me and there's almost nothing I need to do. 

In the dim light, I can see the concentration on her face, the twitching frown, trembling lip. Her hands are in my hair, even as her eyes close and her head tips back and she tenses all over with a deep moan that vibrates through me. 

I'm almost as far gone as she is when she rises to meet me, takes hold of me, lays me down. It's electrifying, it's rapturous, it's exaltation. It stops time, I am only here, in her arms and it could be forever. 

...

I've spent all day with Marianne, but she is tired and I have work tomorrow so we said a regrettable, but lengthy, goodbye and I'm back at my apartment. I make Sophie and I dinner, humming, smiling to myself, just the one swoon. All that time I spent waiting for this, without her, I think I can be allowed a little swoon. 

But now she is here. Now _we_ are here, traveling through time the old-fashioned way, together.

Sophie points at me with her fork. "I finally figured out where I know Marianne from."

"Uh huh." She's been going on about this since the other week at the bar and intensified since we all hung out yesterday. 

"You remember there was, like, that urban legend, when we were at college, about a woman naked on the Metro all the time?"

I laugh. 

"It's her," Sophie hisses. "The Metro nudist. I'm serious."

"You've never been serious about anything in your life," I retort. 

"I'm serious about you not dating a notorious nudist."

"A serial streaker," I smirk. 

"Héloïse!"

"Sophie, it's fine. I know." I do remember the Metro nudist rumors, which I'm now kind of mad I hadn't paid more attention to. 

"You know that your new paramour is partial to running around the city naked? That this is her hobby and you are fine with this? She's clearly some sort of bad news."

Behind me, there's that noise and I don't need to look, I can see Sophie's face, pointed in that very direction. 

"Ladies," Marianne says. "I'm so sorry to drop in like this."

I turn in my chair. By now she's sitting in her usual position, folded in half to protect her modesty as far as possible. "Have you been waiting a long time to be able to use that?"

"Oh, years," she grins. 

I get up and pull a blanket from the sofa. "Where are you from?"

"November 1997. Where am I?" She wraps herself up, stands, nods to Sophie. "Hey, Sophie."

"September 1991. This is the third time you've met Sophie."

Sophie is staring at us like we've completely lost the plot, with a side helping of fearing that it's instead _she_ who has lost the plot.

"Wow, well, good to see you again," Marianne says. 

"Sophie has just finished telling me how you are bad news and also the notorious Metro streaker."

"I do have a run of really bad luck with the Metro through college and in the late 80s," Marianne says. "I was stressed out and ended up there a lot." Every little bit of her is fascinating to me and I drink it all in.

She says to Sophie, "You saw that? Sorry," and Sophie is still reeling and says, "Well, it's not a _bad_ sight," and I laugh.

"You know where my room is," I tell Marianne. "Get some clothes and I'll get you a plate." I don't have a stash of Marianne's clothes here, maybe that's something I should look into. 

As soon as she leaves Sophie is on me, following me through into the kitchen. "What the fuck, Héloïse?"

"Yes," I just agree, a trick I learned from Marianne. 

"She just appeared out of thin air, naked."

"I know."

"How, how do you know?"

"Because she's been doing it almost all my life."

"How is this the first I'm hearing of it? Almost all your life?"

"I'm six when I first meet her. All through my childhood she appears in the meadow, you know, at my house. Out of thin air, just like now. She's all different ages, coming from different years in her present. Traveling through time. Until I'm in college, just before I meet you. Then I don't see her again until a month ago, when she's not traveling, when we are both here." 

"Hold up, hold up. I have a _lot_ of questions."

Marianne's back in the living room, sitting at the table, so I grab a plate and ladle an enormous portion of lasagna out. I nod toward the living room and we go back through. 

"Thank you," Marianne says and immediately attacks it. 

"Sophie has questions," I say. 

"I imagine so," Marianne replies. 

"OK," Sophie begins. "So you can, allegedly, travel through time and you use this skill to, what, haunt the Metro?"

"I can't control it, where or when I go, I can't control any of it," Marianne says. "It just happens."

"Have you met Joan of Arc? Why not assassinate Baby Hitler?"

Marianne smiles. "Two reasons. One is that I've only ever gone a few years before I was born. Two is that I don't think I could assassinate Baby Hitler, even though I would love to. I can't change the past. And believe me, I have tried, with other things."

"But you go back to see Héloïse, multiple times?"

"I don't know how it works, but there are certain big events in my life that I travel to a lot and Héloïse is..." she turns to me, smiles at me, puts a hand over mine, "a big event." This is a Marianne who has been to the meadow, a Marianne I recognize, this is a Marianne who _loves me_ , now, in her present, six years away. The thought thrills me. I love her, I love her so much. 

"Gross," Sophie says. "So when we met and you were all angsty and said you'd had a bad break up..."

That's embarrassing. "Yes, I meant Marianne. Not that anything ever happened, before, but I was heartbroken because I'd just seen her for the last time in eight years and it seemed an easy way to explain it."

"I'm sorry," Marianne says gently.

"So that wasn't Marianne?"

"Marianne, the Marianne in the present, who's right now minding her own business in her own apartment, who doesn't know anything about us talking now, and won't until six years time when she's her," I point at the Marianne sat at the table, who waves, because she's an adorable dork, "the one you met last time, she hadn't met me until a month ago."

"Wait, what?"

I put my head in my hands. 

"Can I get a second helping, please?" Marianne asks very politely. "I think we are in for a long night."

It's not that we manage to get Sophie to understand so much as I think we just confuse her into compliance and exhaustion. She bids us good night after several hours and I'm not sure she's any the wiser. I'm not great with the explanations as it all seems pretty normal to me and Marianne has never had to explain it to anyone.

"She'll get the hang of it," Marianne says confidently.

It's the two of us now, on the sofa. Facing each other at opposite ends our hands meet on the back. I look at her. "It's so good to see you."

She seems to understand what I mean. Her, the her from my childhood.

"You too."

"How am I doing?" I ask her, risking it. "Now, with younger you?" 

"You're perfect." It's not really an answer and I'm not surprised. Very nice to hear, though. 

"I'm worried I'm constantly overwhelming you."

"I'll handle it," she says. "How are _you_ handling it?" 

How indeed. I feel like I'm walking in the clouds and on eggshells at the same time. Everything I spent so long wanting is finally just within my reach and I'm elated and terrified. 

...

I traveled away from Héloïse, for the first time, _and_ from my favorite takeout, a date I had been looking forward to all week, to wind up here, in my father's filthy apartment. I hop up and go to my room, knocking on the door four times, then going in. 

"Hey," we say to each other. I'm about ten, doing homework at my desk. I pull some clothes from the closet. I sit on my bed to put on my sneakers. I need to stock up, the pile is getting low. 

"How are you?"

"Good," she nods. I'm appraising her, casting my mind back. 

"Where am I?"

"April 1973."

"Where's Dad?"

She shrugs.

I'm hungry so I go into the kitchen, with ten-year-old me in my wake. "Sorry," she says.

I open the fridge. It is barren. "Come on."

We ride the Metro, there was enough cash around the apartment for that at least, and we need a bigger haul than the local store can provide. 

Once there I let her pick out whatever she wants, then I supplement it with the real food groups and boringly important things like toilet tissue. A few packs of shirts, sweatpants, underwear, socks, shoes, in different sizes. Ready for whoever, whenever.

On the way round I lift a wallet from a man in a very nice suit, deliberately because his suit is so nice. He carries a significant wad of cash, probably because he likes the way it looks. I put the wallet itself on a shelf.

"If Dad won't give you money you just have to come do this, like we practised."

"It's weird, a kid coming shopping." 

"Just say Dad is sick, if anyone asks. But I don't think it is as weird as it should be, kids having to do this on their own."

"I prefer it when you come." 

I ruffle her hair because I know I hate it. She slaps my hand away, but playfully, and I pull her into a hug. I'm feeling soppy and generous, warmed by a moment eighteen years in the future where Héloïse is at my door with food and kisses me. "You're going to be just fine," I tell myself. I remember liking that. 

She stands on the cart and I spin her up and down the freezer aisles. I'm happy, I realize. This is Héloïse's doing. Making me happy then reaching back through time and making a ten year old happy too. 

I'm so hungry that I start eating our supplies in the taxi on the way home. When we get back I put the shopping away, put the rest of the money in her desk and clean the kitchen while helping her with homework. Then we order pizza and sit on the couch chatting. 

There's the sound of the key in the lock and I jump up. It's an automatic response, to hide from other people, but I hesitate for half a second. I want to see him, no, I want him to see me. I want him to see _her_ , this kid who needs him. I don't, I can't, I didn't. I grab the pizza boxes and head to my room.

It takes him a few tries to get the door unlocked. I stand against the door in my room. "Hi honey," he says to me on the couch. 

"Hi Daddy."

"Good day? Oh, look, you cleaned the kitchen. I would have got to that, don't you worry about that." He believed it too, I know he believed that maybe tomorrow he would get his shit together, that things weren't so bad he needed his daughter tidying up after him. "Listen, I'm real tired, I'm just going to go to bed, OK?"

"OK."

"You're a good girl."

I hear him going down the hall, knocking into the side table. He bashes that thing so much, it wakes me up in the night. But we move it some time and I guess today is the day. His door closes and he hits the bed. He hasn't even undressed.

I open the door. She looks at me, alarmed, on her way to the bedroom. But he's passed out already. I point at the little table and she grins. I move the things off the top and we take a side each, move it as quietly as possible, into the living room. We go back to the bedroom. 

"Will he notice?" she asks, quiet.

"No."

She gets ready for bed and I squeeze in there too. She's getting big, in a few years she'll be about as big as me. I have to sleep on the floor once that happens. We fall asleep. 

I wake up for a moment to the grey dawn before I travel. I thump onto the floor in the hallway of my apartment, on top of some shoes. It's dark and the lights are off. I'm glad I went, even though I missed our meal, might have missed days of Héloïse. 

I get up, rub my ass, go through to the kitchen for some food and she's there. She's there, asleep, leaning over the table, her head cushioned on her arms. Sitting just where she was when I left, but the dishes are tidied away and she's had a glass of wine. 

I kneel down next to her, smooth away the strands of hair that have fallen over her face. "Héloïse," I say quietly. "Héloïse." 

"Mm," she says. Her eyes open slowly. "You're back. Welcome back," and her smile fills me up with warmth. She sits up, stretches, looks me up and down. 

"You stayed." I am in awe. 

"I didn't know what to do."

I shake my head. "Don't wait for me."

"I've always been waiting for you. I've seen you leave so many times, but now you are back." She touches my face, leans forward, kisses me. 

The streetlights bathe everything orange, her eyes are embers. I pull her to standing, put my arms around her. "You made a ten-year-old Marianne very happy today," I tell her. Such a very bizarre thing to say, but I know she will understand what I mean, somehow. 

She exhales, laughs. "Just returning the favor," and she kisses me again and we stumble away to the bed.

...

I was supposed to be spending my weekend with Marianne, but I went to bed alone and woke up alone so followed the trend and went for brunch, as we had planned. It's October, a little on the cool side, but I want to eat outside in the sun. My meal has just arrived when, striding along the sidewalk, resplendent in the morning sunlight, comes Marianne. She's dashing, handsome... and dressed like a homeless person, all over-sized, mismatched men's clothing. 

"You didn't mug a tramp for his clothes did you?" I ask. 

"How could you even think..." but she's teasing me, smiling, as she bends down to kiss me. This seems risqué, but I could sense her good mood from down the street and am far from complaining. 

She takes some toast off my plate. I wave the waiter over and she orders the biggest brunch on the menu, plus extras. 

We walk back to mine through the park and she twirls me around and kisses me when no-one is looking. I had never dreamed it was possible to be so in love. 

...

I'm sixteen and waiting for Marianne in the meadow. I have been here for hours already. I can't bear to be in the house and I want to see Marianne, need to see Marianne, so much that I hoped maybe the universe could feel it and bring her early. It didn't. So I sit in the drizzle getting increasingly damp. 

There's the noise, then there's Marianne. She rolls herself to sitting, tucks up her knees. "Hello," she smiles. 

I feel bad. She never knows what she is literally dropping into. I toss the bag over to her and she gets dressed. A holey old shirt, the cardigan, some sweatpants. There are several dishes of food beside me too, there is _a lot_ of food at the house at the moment. 

She looks up at the sky. "Don't you want to go inside?"

"No," I say, sullen. 

She pulls out the raincoat and crawls over to me. "What's the date?"

I tell her. 

"Oh, Héloïse," she says. "Sweetheart, I'm so sorry." She gathers me up into her arms. She's never called me that before. But, then, my father has never been dead before. 

"I'm OK," I say, muffled. 

"I know," she says and rubs my back. She means that she knows I am not, but am saying it anyway. That she knows why I have to say it.

After several minutes of this, I turn a little in her arms. "How did you know, what had happened?"

"Of course I know," she says.

"Because we're friends, in the future?"

"Yes," she says, her tone uncharacteristically flat, trying not to give anything away. 

"Why didn't you tell me? You could have warned me."

"We don't get warnings," she says gently. Squeezes my shoulder. 

She's right, of course. What was she supposed to say, as a warning? Even then I realized that. "Do you know when you are going to die?"

"No."

"You've never tried to find out?"

"No." She says it very simply and I believe her.

"I think I would." I believed that too, then. 

She nods. "Everyone's different." It's oddly reassuring. "Whatever you feel, it's OK."

"Whatever?" I challenge. In the wake of my father's death I have felt such a rush of emotions, some of which shame me and seem inappropriate. People only want me to be sad and even that only in a limited way. When mostly what I feel is anger. 

"Yes," again, so straightforward, without qualification. "Whatever you feel." 

It's a strange conversation, but it's the most real conversation anyone has had with me, since. Or that I know I will have until Marianne comes back. Which isn't for two months and that thought causes another wave of the pain. 

"Don't go," I whisper to her. 

"I'd stay if I could," she murmurs into my hair. 

It's too much. I wriggle out of her arms and get to my feet. "But I need you. I need you now, not in two months." 

"I'm sorry." She gets up too. 

"Give me your address." She looks at me blankly. I demand again, "Your address. You are out there, now, sixteen years old. I'll call you, I'll explain, you'll understand. We can be friends, properly." I think I said it to hurt her and I do hurt her with it, I can see it, as hard as she tries not to let it show.

"I can't, I'm sorry." 

"You don't understand," I snap at her and bless her she didn't argue the case. Even though now I know she very much did understand. Sixteen-year-old Marianne, out there, had a lot going on herself and could have used a friend too. 

I didn't have the energy or, really, the inclination to be angry with her. I was just angry, in general. She didn't hold it against me though, she never did. 

When I slumped to the floor she came and sat by me, put the raincoat around my shoulders and held my hand. I turned to her and she put her arm around me and I cried on her shoulder until she said she was going. When she had gone I laid on top of her clothes and cried on them, for different reasons. 

...

By the beginning of November, the holiday lights have gone up, the stores are packed, everything is almost in full swing. The year seems at least one-fourth Christmas. 

Héloïse mentions a few times that she will be going back home for the holidays and is very gently probing as to my plans. "What did you do last year?" 

"Nothing. Just a day. The year before that I was traveling." I'd been in 1965, two years after I was born. I watched my parents perform at the orchestra. "It's just, I have a bit of experience with bad Christmases."

She's looking at me very patiently, but I don't know know how to go on. I just shrug. "I would go to my grandparents and my dad would just stay home and get drunk."

"That must have been hard. There's a lot of pressure around holidays." 

"It's not just Christmas, her not being around at Christmas... the accident was on Christmas Eve."

"Oh, Marianne, sweetheart." She's never called me that before. 

"I was in the car. When it happened."

Her eyebrows jump and her hand moves to mine. She doesn't say anything, yet, she waits for me.

"I traveled. It was only the second time I ever did. Fight or flight, but if I hadn't, or if I couldn't..." 

She takes both my hands, bends to kiss them. I close my eyes for a moment. 

"I turned up on the verge a few minutes later, naked, just the tiniest scratch on me. No-one understood how I got out, the car was totaled. The whole thing was just chaos and every time I go back I think maybe this time I can do something, but I can't stop it." 

She cups my cheek. "You travel back there?"

"Oh, a dozen times. I sit with myself, there are things I can do, but I can't stop it."

"It was already in your past," she says, reassuring me. 

"So, yeah, Christmas." I try to bring us back. 

"I thought about you," she says, looking at our hands in her lap. 

"You did?" It hurts in the best possible way. 

She nods. "It's weird, you don't want to know." 

"Tell me, please, would you?" I need this. I need to redeem all of those shitty days with just a little bit of something good. 

She moves closer. "I imagined what you might be doing. Though I had nothing to go on. Every Christmas, every New Years, every holiday. For twenty-two years. Every..." she almost doesn't say it, but she does, "...day. Every day, Marianne. You wouldn't even tell me your birthday. Which is probably for the best." She laughs. "You would have had a birthday party in absentia. I thought of you, out there somewhere. And I hoped you were well and happy and safe. But I think you mostly weren't and I hate that."

"I am now."

She rubs her thumb over my knuckles. "I'm so happy you are finally here. I'm finally here. Both."

I want to say, "Me too," but it wouldn't make sense because I've not been waiting for her. Except I have. I really have. "I'm so happy you're here too," I say and it feels like I'm telling her I love her.

So I say, "I love you," the easiest thing in the world. The truest, easiest thing.

The happiness washes over her. "You do?"

"Yes." No doubt or hesitation or confusion.

She almost jumps into my arms, takes my face into her hands, kisses me. 

Then she starts to speak, but I put a finger to her lips, trace them gently. "You don't have to say it. I'm in love and I can't play it cool to save my life. Things are more complicated for you and I understand that. You loved me then, in your past, in my future, but you don't have to say it now."

"I love you," she says the moment I move my hand. "I love you now. You are a whole, new, wonderful, unpredictable person that I knew nothing about and I love you." 

...

The next morning we are lying in bed. I swirl my fingers in the hair at the back of Marianne's neck. I love it. 

I kiss her. "Do you want to come with me, for Christmas?" Immediately as I say it the panic sets in. "Is it too soon? Say if it's too soon, I'm not sure I can tell the difference anymore." 

"That sounds really nice. But I don't know if I can," she falters. "I don't know, I travel a lot when I'm stressed and stuff. And it's stressful in general, that time. And meeting your mother, no offense, feels sort of stressful."

"You and me both." This Marianne has not endured fourteen years of my almost non-stop complaints about my mother. 

"Have you taken anyone home before?" she asks, shy and adorable. 

"No," I say, trying not to make it sound like a big deal. "Well, Sophie." Because why would I bother taking anyone else home when I thought there was ever a chance it would be Marianne? I realize, with a thrill, that it _is_ Marianne, that I could have Marianne in the meadow and in the Reading Room and everything will be that bit closer to coming full circle. "I think Mama has given up on me. Alicia has enough romantic dramas for the both of us anyway."

Marianne yawns. "Who needs romantic dramas when you can have time traveling ones instead?"

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes."

I kiss her and tell her I love her, because now I've started I can't stop. "Don't go anywhere," I instruct and she wriggles down further into the covers. 

In the kitchen, robe on, I switch the coffee machine on and pick up the phone. I pause over it for a moment, then dial home. 

Etta answers and we chat for a few minutes. I ought to call more often, just to talk to her. Then she hands me over to my mother. There are pleasantries and we hit the lull all too quickly, but I am prepared. 

"So, I met someone. Her name is Marianne and I would like to invite her back for Christmas."

Mama says nothing. The line feels heavy. Then, "Of course, your friend is welcome."

"She's not my friend, Mama," I say, managing to sound much more gentle than I am feeling. But I have to nip that in the bud. "We're in love." I love her, I can say it, I don't want to stop saying it. 

I imagine her squeezing the handset. I can almost feel it down the line. "Good. Wonderful. I shall look forward to meeting..." she stumbles, "Marianne."

"Thank you," I say. I know that when she actually meets Marianne she will be charmed.

I hang up and take a deep breath, go into the bedroom, where Marianne remains. "Well," I say, equal parts triumph and defeat. "I just came out to my mother." 

...

"Dad?" I unlock the door when he doesn't come to answer, put the key back away. He doesn't know there's a spare hidden by the door. He has managed to remain oblivious to a lot of things. 

The fact his daughter oscillates in age, he has definitely seen me when traveling, definitely while I was still living at home, the fact his daughter creeps around naked a lot, that she comes and goes, even if he hasn't seen me physically disappear there are absences. That like the last time I was here and had traveled to the apartment, some things just seem to happen, the place gets cleaned, his child gets fed, bills get paid, someone calls a handyman about the broken things. Maybe he assumes it's him, in a very productive blackout. 

People can believe, make themselves believe, almost anything they want to avoid uncomfortable or seemingly impossible truths. When you have a habit of vanishing into thin air you realize this. People must preserve the status quo at all times. It helps, in fact.

"Dad?" I say again. I haven't been to the apartment, in the present, since I met Héloïse, over three months and I feel bad, but the distraction has been of the most amazing sort and I deserved to enjoy that for a little while.

He rattles out of the kitchen, literally rattling, his hands shaking as he holds a teacup and saucer. "Hi honey."

"Hi Dad." I cross the room, kiss him. It's 10am and there's whiskey in that cup, on his breath. Everything in here is chaotic. There are newspapers in great stacks, glasses and mugs everywhere, empty plates, although at least that means he's eating. The kitchen is a mess, I doubt there's anything in the fridge. Laundry in various states sits on the couch and table. "What are your plans for today?"

"Oh, you know," he says and I do. 

"Can I give you a hand with anything?"

"No, I'm fine." 

We stand there in the middle of that apartment clutching our shields of denial and unable to connect. He breaks first, moves plates and newspapers and a basket of laundry off the couch. This one has been washed, but festered, damp and undried. 

We sit down. 

"There's someone I want you to meet," I say, with no fanfare, because if I don't say it now I might not. 

He looks over my shoulder in alarm. 

"Not now," I say quickly. "But soon, hopefully."

"That's nice," he says, alarm passed. "What's their name?"

"Héloïse." I love saying her name, I don't say it enough. 

"A girl, good, girls are nice."

I laugh. "Well, this one is," I agree. 

"I'm glad, that's good." He's half-hearted and struggling because he's torn. Being happy is dangerous, being in love is dangerous. It's too easy for it to be taken away. 

"It's just hard for me, you know, because I'm away a lot." 

He nods, but I don't know if he's playing along with the illusion or taking it at face value. I wish I could ask him, but I can't.

"But I wanted to talk to you about it. I really want her to come here sometime, but if that's too much..." and I don't need to finish the sentence. "So we could have dinner at my place, or hers is bigger, or we can go to a restaurant. Whatever you prefer and I can come over before, help you out with anything."

He would prefer not to go anywhere or do anything, I know, and I sympathize.

"I don't know, honey. It's not that I don't want to, I'm just real busy." 

I ignore the lies. "I'm going away for Christmas, with her, to see her family."

He takes a drink. This can't be a surprise, we haven't spent Christmas together in years. We would be awful together. "Serious. You sure you up to it?"

No, no I am not, I am constantly plagued by the fear I am in no way equal to this, to her. I smile though. "Thanks, Dad."

"Can I think about it?"

"Sure, but before Christmas, OK?" It's still six weeks away, you would think it were possible, but I have my doubts. 

"OK."

"Thank you."

I persuade him to let me take some stuff down to the trash 'on the way out' which turns into several trips up and down the stairs. I go to the store without needing an excuse, I'm just hungry, bring some supplies back and clean the kitchen, for the second time in my week, while I heat the food. He stays on the couch. I think he might be crying.

We eat lunch and when I get up off the couch I can feel it coming. "Bye, Dad," I say hurriedly and go to my bedroom, hoping he won't notice I'm not actually leaving, just getting the door closed before I'm gone.


	3. Chapter 3

I was at Dad's two hours before we were due to meet Héloïse. I think I'm as nervous as him, but I don't want either of us to be. I called him last night, checking in. And the night before. He was at home, at least. Made sure he had some clean, unrumpled clothes. Ironed them for him. I don't even iron my own clothes.

"Are you ready?"

"Ready," he says, pulling at his cuffs in discomfort. When he was in the orchestra he used to wear suits all the time. He looked so good, that timeless, classic look of a really good suit, of self-assuredness. I know my mom looked very glamorous in her dresses, but I wasn't that kid. I wanted the suit.

For my part, I've stretched to a button-down shirt. It's an advantage I hadn't foreseen, that if I travel when I'm with Héloïse I don't necessarily lose all my stuff. The other week she brought everything back to my apartment for me while I was gone. She cleared the souring milk from the refrigerator. I'm hit with a wave of loving her, the lightheaded, knee-weakening feeling like I'm about to travel, but it's my heart trying to jump out of my chest.

We're running the risk of standing her up. I decide on a taxi. Dad will get upset with the crush of the crowds on the Metro and I will too, in all honesty. He protests, but I don't care.

At the restaurant Héloïse is there, I'm guiding Dad over and she stands and smiles and he looks at me in disbelief. "I know," I say.

"It's so good to meet you," she says, not waiting on my uselessly overwhelmed self to do the introductions. "I'm Héloïse."

"Richard," he says.

We sit down and she squeezes my hand quickly. I wish I could kiss her. "You look lovely," I say, though this is not a date with my dad third-wheeling.

"So do you," she says, a lie. I'm stressed, sweating, one step up from having just rolled out of bed.

The waiter comes and I'm sweating again, but Héloïse is handling it with her firm grace, water for the table, asking my dad if he wants anything in a light, gentle way. 

She knows, she knows everything, I told her in a burst of shame and sadness, about how he couldn't handle anything after my mom died, he drank himself out of a job, too messed up to play. About all those times finding him covered in vomit and hosing him down in the shower, being mad with him, that he couldn't pull it together even for me. I'm not mad with him anymore. I'm just sad. Mom would be sad too.

Dad is there over the table not knowing what to do. I didn't tell him not to drink, I didn't mention it. Héloïse has made it clear that we aren't, but that he can, he knows I don't, if he remembers. I think he thinks my abstinence is a comment on him, rather than for its own reasons. But he can if he wants. I'm certainly not asking him to go cold turkey. 

So we wait. He declines, "Maybe later," he says. The first hurdle has been cleared.

He asks how we met, there is plenty of conversation to be made at a first meeting at least. Héloïse gives a plausible story, the truth omitting the more fantastical elements. That we met at the library, went for dinner, all true except that the one would never have followed the other if it hadn't been for everything else. If she hadn't already known me she would never have looked at me twice and I'm close to following it down the rabbit hole into a desperate musing on determinism and fate and quantum universes. But she's looking at me and holding me here, she is here, no matter how implausible it might all be. 

She and my father are talking about her job now and I start to relax. The food comes out and I realize at least half of my nerves are because I'm hungry so I'm soon feeling much better and actually joining in the conversation.

Until I almost have an out of body experience when Dad mentions my mom.

"Annette was so full of life," he says and I almost choke on my mouthful.

"I can imagine," Héloïse says gently, glancing at me and smiling and I don't want it, I don't want that responsibility, but I love her, I think I might already be too far gone and I'm horribly sure she is too. 

I'm not like Mom, I'm not graceful and kind and funny. I'm like him, I could be him now, driven to alcoholism by her loss except that I time travel instead. A mess, essentially.

He tells Héloïse about the orchestra, about times before I was born and when I was little. One show in particular and Héloïse thinks her parents saw it, says she will ask her mother and the connections are all flying through my mind.

I don't want to run off and cause a scene, but it's less scene than I will cause if I disappear from the table. I will myself to stay, sometimes it's not traveling coming on, but the anxiety about traveling making me feel almost as bad, as liable to bolt and needing to calm down.

Héloïse's knee touches mine under the table. She is leaning forward, she knows, she is comforting me the only way she can think how. She steers the conversation to her own family, has to go through the sharp pain of explaining about her dad, she is doing this for me. I feel like I've barely said a word all night.

Dad is starting to go a bit downhill now, poor Héloïse with not one but two terrible dinner companions. He is looking about, nervous, his leg bounces under the table.

"I might just..." he says and Héloïse nods to a waiter.

She knows I don't mind her drinking, but she tends not to when we are together, says she is not fussed one way or the other. Now she orders two small glasses of wine and drinks with my father. All perfectly ordinary, nothing to see here. Just an alcoholic having dinner with his time traveling daughter and her absolute hero of a girlfriend. 

If I am in this many pieces over her meeting my father, in neutral territory, on just a random day of the year... I start to have very real concerns about what is coming next. But I try to forget that. I try to be here, now. And to think instead about how I am going to reward Héloïse's heroic efforts later. 

...

I pull up the drive, crunching the gravel. Marianne is in the passenger seat straining to look at the house. I park and look at her. I am about to walk her into the lion's den. 

"Just remember," I say with mock seriousness disguising the actual seriousness, "that I love you very much." 

"OK," she smiles. 

"Do you forgive me?"

"Yes. You are forgiven already, in advance."

"Thank you." 

"Thank you for bringing me."

"Don't thank me yet." 

"It's going to be fine."

I reach for her and she comes, I slide closer on the seat, arms around one another, I kiss her. I kiss her as if our lives depend on it, certainly my sanity depends on it. But I'm still at the point where I can hardly look at Marianne without wanting to kiss her, and hardly kiss her without wanting to ravish her and I am putting serious thought into this possibility when she pulls back. The car is flooded with light from the door of the house where my mother is standing, watching. 

Which is just great. So I mutter a few curse words under my breath while Marianne tries to hide her smile and we get out the car. 

"Mama," I say, my hands, my mouth, still tingling with Marianne. "Good evening."

She kisses me lightly on each cheek. "Good journey?"

"Yes, thank you." I hold out my hand to Marianne, pulling her closer. "Mama, this is my girlfriend, Marianne. Marianne, this is my mother, Lucille."

Marianne puts out her hand. "It's nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having me at your home." God, she's good.

Mama gives Marianne a very protracted once-over, looking her up and down very unsubtly, very deliberately. Then she takes Marianne's hand for the slightest sliver of a second, drops it immediately. "Of course," she says, not a greeting or a welcome at all. "Come on in, Etta will get your bags later." I'm not having Etta unload my car so I ignore her and we get our own bags from the trunk. 

She waits with exaggerated annoyance in the hall. "Héloïse, Marianne will be staying in the blue room. I'll leave you to freshen up. Dinner as usual." She sweeps away before I can protest. Of the two guest bedrooms, the blue room is on the other side of the house from my room, beyond Mama's, and is usually where my aunt stays. 

"The blue room," Marianne teases as we walk up the stairs. 

"There's a perfectly good guest room over the hall from mine," I say. "This has been done deliberately."

"I didn't expect much else," she says, unperturbed. I don't know why I did. 

To spite Mama we take the left turn off the stairs and I show Marianne to my room first. "Alicia is next door and I guess Aunt Dulcie is opposite, having been kicked out of her usual room."

But she isn't interested in my griping, she is exploring my room like it is a museum, walking slowly round, looking at the exhibits. I haven't changed much since I left for college, I'm only here a few times a year. Alicia on-and-off lives here so her room has developed a lot. And I didn't want to change things. This room is full of Marianne and I needed that during those years between. 

She's holding a photo of me, it's a blown-out yellow, evocative of the summer day it was. I'm holding a branch, almost half a small tree, grinning, tousled, tired after a full day in the sun. I remember. Marianne took that photo and, in a way, it's the closest thing I ever had to a photo of her, which of course I never could do. That's why I had it, framed it, kept it here. I used to look at it and think I could see her, reflected in my eyes, in my smile. 

"You little goof," she says fondly. She's going to see a lot more goofiness than that. She looks around. She taps the two conkers that hang off the edge of the shelf, taped there like a kids mobile. 

In the past, the future, wherever that time lies, Marianne never comes to my bedroom. The Reading Room contains even more treasures and I will show her later, but have no wish to overwhelm her. And this is nicer than I ever could have anticipated, having her here in the calm, dark time before dinner, having her see this. 

I move over to her, put my arms around her waist, my chin on her shoulder. There's something else to it, here. I'm not sure I will ever get used to the feeling of Marianne in my arms, in the sense of it being ordinary, I hope I never do, it's certainly not happened yet. She leans back into me, she feels the same, I know she does, albeit without the years of anticipation. I feel dizzy on it, drunk, the back and forth between our bodies, our minds, our history and future.

She rubs her hands across my arms. "It's really nice, all these memories," she says and I hum into her shoulder. "I'm glad you had that with your dad." 

I react without thinking. "God, no, Papa never did anything like that with me."

"But the bird box and the brambles and... You said..." She turns in my arms. She understands, I see it hit. "That was me?" 

"I'm sorry. I'm always trying not to say, but if there's anything good in my childhood it's you."

She pulls me into a hug and her hand goes to my hair and I recognize this embrace, this comfort. Recognizable, but not ordinary, never to be taken for granted. I relax into it until the bell sounds, ten to seven, time for dinner. 

"A dinner bell, are you kidding?"

I squeeze her tighter. "Oh, my love, you haven't seen anything yet."

We go to the bathroom quickly and hustle downstairs. Alicia is hanging around outside the dining room, apparently just to see me. She gives me a hug and she looks well, I've certainly seen her looking far worse. She hugs Marianne too and I see the surprise.

"God, you're gorgeous," Alicia says and Marianne turns a very attractive pink. "Héloïse, what the hell?"

"I know," I say. We go into the dining room the three of us together and Mama is being too polite to tell us off for being late. 

Marianne is introduced to my aunt, I say hello, and we take our places. Soup first and when Etta comes to clear the table I watch Marianne not knowing what to do with herself and undoubtedly wondering what on earth she has got herself into. 

Alicia carries the initial conversation, she's on something of a high, though a natural one. I see Mama getting annoyed at her casually throwing the word "rehab" around. She whizzes onward and is soon putting me in the path of Mama's consternation. "So how did you guys meet? No offense, Héloïse, but I'm struggling a little."

I glare at her. Marianne laughs as she answers. "I went to the library doing some research, for work."

"Was she mean to you? She's always complaining about the people using the library, as though that weren't the point of the job."

"For about half a sentence," Marianne says, smiling. 

I smile back. "Until I turned around."

Alicia sighs. "Love at first sight."

"Something like that," I say, at the same time as Marianne whispers, "Yes," and I could jump over the table and kiss her. 

My mother cannot allow frivolity to continue, however. "It has been... five months?"

"It feels much longer," I say. All of a sudden I'm angry with her, in a contrary way. I kept Marianne hidden, but she was coming and going from this house, from my life, for fourteen years, how is it possible my own mother never knew, saw, or even suspected? Where was she? 

After a warm-up period, Mama starts addressing Marianne directly, which may or may not be a good thing. I start to think I should have laid some groundwork, but we haven't spoken much since I invited Marianne along and those conversations were only making plans. I should have tried to spare Marianne some of this, but what else would we have to talk about?

So I watch my mother blunder into Marianne's past like I did at our first dinner. I thought I had known Marianne so completely, then, because I knew every little gesture, because she was so familiar to me. Familiar, but unknown. 

"At the Philharmonie?" Mama says. She snags on Marianne's surname. "But of course, your mother - oh, my dear, I am sorry."

"It's fine," Marianne says.

"I must have seen your parents play a dozen times. I remember the news, it was so shocking and it was... about this time of year."

Some maternal instinct is being stirred in Mama. It's not Marianne she objects to, in any case, it's me. It's learning something about me, being presented with evidence of something about me, that she would rather keep unsaid. Alicia and rehab, me and Marianne. She will come to love Marianne, I know she will. Whether she and I can bridge that gap though, of that I am less sure. 

...

After dinner, Héloïse and Alicia gravitate to "the rec room" which I am no longer surprised to find is a room entirely devoted to a pool table, also featuring several couches and a drinks trolley. 

Alicia pours herself a drink, both Héloïse and I shake our heads. Alicia must see something in Héloïse's look. "One vice at a time," she says. 

"I thought Mama was going to strangle you for talking about rehab at the dinner table."

"Did you like that?" Alicia grins, collecting the balls together. "I was trying to hit it as often as possible."

Héloïse laughs. "Why?"

"Because I'm sick of having to pretend half my life isn't happening."

I raise my glass of water and Alicia knocks our drinks together. "Welcome to the family," she says, grim. She racks up and looks to Héloïse. "Which I've recently come to realize you must also have been feeling. How long?"

"About half my life," Héloïse agrees. 

"God, no wonder you were always locked away reading or, I don't know, wandering the hills."

"While you were high as a kite, or running away, or God knows what."

"Fun times," Alicia concludes. "Who wants to break?"

We play several games of pool and I lose all of mine. I neither grew up in a house with a pool table, nor played with friends. Héloïse and Alicia are both good and evenly matched and I gain far more enjoyment sitting on the arm of the couch watching Héloïse's frown of concentration as she lines up her shots. She barely reacts to a success and is devastated by every loss. 

After they have exhausted their competitive spirit we are all on the couch. Alicia is several drinks in and Héloïse is relaxed enough to be sitting very close, almost draped over me. Which is as welcome as it is surprising. 

"Are you _sure_ you didn't go to school with Héloïse?" Alicia points at me, still holding her glass, squinting around it.

"I think I would have remembered," Héloïse laughs. 

"You look sort of familiar. I could swear one time I saw a woman..."

"A woman? When we were kids?"

"No, you're right, she was older. She was in the basement, I was sneaking around because I thought I'd left contraband in my laundry and she came out of the bathroom and looked right at me and said 'hi, Alicia'."

I am thinking this is probably important to remember, but there's nothing much to go on and, like Héloïse's past, it has already happened. Nothing I can do.

"She knew my name and she looked just like Marianne, except, like, forty, and this was years ago. Hey, Marianne, you look real good for your mid-fifties."

Héloïse laughs. "Time travel," she says lightly and Alicia laughs too.

"That or, most likely explanation, I was tripping."

Héloïse moves closer to me, not that it's possible to get much closer than we are and I think, well, if that's the closest shave we have, that's no bad thing at all. 

...

I call my dad on Christmas Eve. Héloïse puts me in the Reading Room for privacy, but we mostly just sit in silence, but together. We get a bit of mileage out of my being away, a little chat about the journey then silence again. "Love you, Dad," I say eventually and hang up so he doesn't have to say it back. 

Héloïse showed me the Reading Room on my initial tour of the house, but she hasn't brought me back and I think she might be embarrassed. Or it looks very weird to be showing a guest a storage closet in the basement. We walked for far longer in the grounds. 

I sit there for a while, surrounded by the relics of my future. I thought it would freak me out, but it's actually kind of comforting. There's some sort of echo through the years, it's like I can feel the memories through time. 

The previous Christmas Eve was the last time I got drunk. Which I hadn't done for ages before, but I think in some perverse way I had wanted to travel, wanted just to skip the whole sorry business. I didn't, just spent Christmas miserably hungover and eating leftover takeout. 

There are four little knocks on the door, my special knock I use with myself, and, of course, I realize, with her. "Come in," I say, and her head pops in. 

"Everything OK?"

I nod and she comes, locks the door, sits next to me. It's almost pitch black, just a faint blue light from some electrical somethings. She puts her arms around me, kisses my forehead. It's not OK, but it's much better than it ever was. 

...

Back in Paris, well into 1992, we shuttle back and forth between our apartments for longer than is really necessary. I like staying at Marianne's because Sophie is a pain, but mine is closer to work. Marianne likes staying at mine because Sophie is a pain and this amuses her no end. And she's just very amenable in general, happy to be inconvenienced.

We are lying in bed one morning trying to plan the various comings and goings. She has work to finish so needs to be at hers and I have a staff meeting early tomorrow so I need to be here so whether she will come over in the dead of night or we will have to spend the night apart, then the next day she has a parcel coming and I would go to hers except for something or other and so on interminably.

I stroke her cheek. "Why are we doing this?"

She smiles, lowers her gaze, bashful almost. "Because you haven't said you don't want to, yet." She had been waiting for me. 

"I don't want to do this." I had been waiting for her. 

"Then let's not," she says gently. 

"Are you sure?" This has been a fantasy for so long for me and I don't want to crush her with it even though I am trembling with anticipation. 

"I spend so much time coming and going, so much time away from you involuntarily. When I'm here I want to be here, with you."

She gathers me up and kisses me and I am late for work. 

...

I've just spent six hours in the rural Loire Valley in the late Sixties, wearing some hippy attire I stole out a tent and being chased by a farmer, when I pop back into my apartment, unfortunately narrowly missing the couch and landing on the floor. 

"Welcome back," Héloïse says, peering at me from the hall, where she had been either coming or going, I can't tell. 

I hop to my feet. " _Please_ tell me I didn't miss dinner. I'm starving."

"You missed yesterday's dinner, yes, but the leftovers are in the fridge."

"I'm sorry," I say and kiss her. 

Her hands run up my arms and she stops. "You're bleeding."

"You should see the other bramble bush." 

"Go get in the shower and I'll heat it up."

So I do. I think about how this is what it will be like, when we live together. We'll both come back to the same place. In time, in space. Even if one or the other of us isn't there we'll still be there, it will be infused with us. Our home. It's nice. I already know it's nice. 

After I've showered she liberally douses me in antiseptic and I don't tell her I very rarely bother with such little scratches. 

"Did you like any of the places?" I have escaped a day of looking at real estate. 

"They were OK. Sophie came with me." She sits back, admires her handiwork. "Why don't we just move to a hut in the woods? You wouldn't have to worry about people seeing you traveling. We could just be."

I look at her in mock horror. "And miss out on all this?" I opine foolishly. "The rats on the Metro and the opportunity to streak down the Champs Elysee at lunchtime? The traffic and the noise and the crowds and the expense? Never!" I kiss her. "Your work is here, your friends are here, our life is here. I love being here, with you. Life isn't supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be _good_. And my life is so good."

She shakes her head at me, smiling though. "You know what literally anyone else would do if they could travel to the future, or had visits from themselves from the future?"

"No, what?"

"The lottery."

"Which is cheating," I say very seriously. 

"Show me the lottery rule that says time travelers aren't allowed to play." 

"OK, that's true. Do you want to win the lottery?"

She thinks about it. "No. It's just funny you've never thought about it."

I don't buy a lottery ticket. I do start giving myself stock tips. That seems a less extreme, though still extremely profitable, approach. 

...

When we look around apartments Marianne just watches me, my reactions. "Do you like it?" I ask her. 

"Do you?" she returns, as though it is purely my decision and I try to reassure her that though it is mostly my money it is _our_ home and she smiles and says she knows and continues to defer to me.

Until one place, the last place, as it is fated to be, and she is failing to suppress her delight before we are even in the front door. It's a converted warehouse, big, on the corner so there's a space for her studio on the one side, a big open lounge and kitchen, bedrooms and so on at the other side. Lots of light, a balcony, I love it. It and the main building fit all Marianne's time travel requirements and a few months later it's ours. 

...

Moving day arrives and Héloïse is _very stressed_. I owned none of the furniture in my tiny apartment so my move was completed yesterday, by car. Héloïse's is today, by van, and I have already been in serious trouble twice.

Happily, when we pull up at the new place, the cavalry is waiting, wearing weird, but appropriate overalls.

"Hello," future Marianne says, already smiling at my helplessness and Héloïse's wrath. Héloïse hugs her, then hugs me and apologizes for having so traumatized me that it becomes a traveling flashpoint. "Only for a year," Marianne jokes. 

When Sophie arrives to help she barely even blinks at the two of me and the four of us get the van unloaded and furniture arranged and even paint a wall. Gone 10pm we get takeout and eat on the floor and it's the weirdest and most normal my life has ever been. 

...

When 1981 rolls in I'm seventeen and getting really rather desperate. We are sat in the Reading Room, reading, appropriately.

"Marianne..." I say, an obvious prelude. 

She's reading with her nose tucked into the cardigan and I know exactly what I'll be doing the moment she leaves. 

"Mm?" She slots in her bookmark and looks up at me.

"There are only a few dates left in the notebook."

"Yes," she agrees in the way she does. 

"So... what happens then?"

She holds out her hand and gestures for the notebook. It's pretty scuffed up after all these years. I mostly keep it tucked under my mattress, as though it is contraband of some sort, but I have brought it here today specifically for this conversation because the blank pages coming up are tormenting me. 

When I hand it over her fingers touch mine. Just the lightest graze of her fingertips. Part of me immediately wishes her away, though I would never willingly squander time with her, I need her gone so I can attend to things, I am drowning in lust and feel I might jump her if I do not get release. I would put my lips to where her neck had rested on the collar of the cardigan, or, like now, her lips, lock the door even though no one ever came down there and hold it to my face with one hand while the other got busy. But I don't drown or burst or otherwise disgrace myself. 

She frowns, thinking, as she looks at the dates. There are ten more before I leave for college in September. After that, one the next Easter. Eight months. Then a few months later in the summer. After that, it's _two years_ and a few months. The summer I am twenty. And that is, frankly, unacceptable. It seems like the worst, until I hear what is about to come. 

"Hm," she says, saying nothing. 

"Are you sure they are right?" I clutch at straws. All the others have been. 

"I'm sorry," she says. So, yes, then. 

"And after the last one?"

"Then we meet, for real. No time traveling."

This is the one exception to the no-future rule. That we know each other in the future is why she is here.

"When?" Now I am butting up against the no-future rule but I do this fairly regularly, it is not surprising. I assume she has this all figured out. I assume a lot of her though she is only doing the best she can, in the moment. Muddling through, as we all are. 

"I don't know if..."

But I am prepared. "You gave me these dates. Why not that one?"

"I gave you these dates so you knew when I would be here."

"So I could bring you clothes and food." I'm angry that she won't give me this so I come out swinging. The implication that she has used me. Even if she only wanted to be fed and clothed she has given me so much more in return so I am simultaneously angry with her and ashamed of myself for it. But I am angry with her over factors out of her control, whereas being angry is entirely within mine. I want to apologize, I want to throw myself at her, not like I did a few minutes ago, but so she can hold me and stroke my hair like she does sometimes when I am sad. 

She won't rise to it, she never rises to it. She just takes it. This makes me even angrier. I imagine it's because she doesn't care. Really, of course, from this vantage point, it's because I was a petulant teenager and she is a much better person than I can ever dream of being. 

Also from this vantage point I know she knows that she _does_ tell me, because I tell her as much when we do meet. But she doesn't know if it's now. Our final meeting of my childhood is still two and a half years away. She doesn't know whether this is too soon, too long for me to be fearing the eight years to come. 

Equally, in that moment, I am ready to rage until I get what I want. She knows that too. 

She's still thinking. "If I tell you..." she finally says, very carefully, "you have to talk to me about it. Promise you won't storm off."

I am truly outraged by the suggestion I would do such a thing, except I know I would do such a thing. Also, this is obviously bad news so I steel myself. "I won't." This may well be a lie. I'm running through options in my head. Another two years? It's unthinkable. 

She faces me, looking very serious, but trying to look encouraging too. She's such an oddball and I have a surge of adoration that makes me promise myself I will not misbehave.

She takes my hands. It's definitely bad news. 

"Eight years."

Everything stops. Blood pounds in my ears. I think I must have misheard. "What... what year?"

"1991. We're twenty-eight when we meet in real-time." 

"No." I snatch my hands away. 

"Héloïse..." she pleads. 

"No," I say again, trying to stand and fumbling over my feet that have gone numb with the shock. I make it to the door and remember she had asked me to stay. I want to stay. I also want to run screaming out of the house and throw myself onto the grass in the meadow and go back in time to when I was six and I had her all to myself all over again.

One hand on the door handle, but I don't leave. I lean against the door and sob into the wall. She's right behind me, but she won't touch me. So I turn and tip myself into her. We're the same height now but part of me always looks up to her, like I physically had to for so long. She's larger than life to me. She puts her arms around me, holds me against her shoulder, runs a hand across my hair. "I'm sorry," she murmurs, rocking me a bit. "I'm sorry."

"It's too long," I sob against her. 

"I know, I know."

"It's not fair."

"It's not," she agrees. She always agrees with me when I'm in a rage. Later she will say something eminently sensible to console or motivate me but she will wait until I am calmer, receptive, so that it doesn't sound like a placation or an excuse or a way to shut me up. The problem is, every time she is so lovely, I love her even more, and that does not help the upcoming heartbreak. 

Two years, I was mad about the two years, but I knew it could be done. This is just that, four times. No, that does not help. It's eleven years away. That's well over half my life, again. That definitely does not help. I am unable to talk myself round. I need her, that eminent good sense. 

My breath steadies. I move away from her, I can't stay forever, so I sit down on the futon instead. "Tell me something good about this."

She crouches down in front of me, holds my hand. "It will happen. That's a certainty not everyone gets." 

At the time the consolation was limited, but as I went through those eight years it became more and more important to me. I saw other people tearing themselves apart over meeting The One, or worrying they had missed the boat on marriage, that they were being left on the shelf. And I trusted that, however Marianne and I knew each other in her present and even if it wasn't what I so wanted, she was there and that I would meet her again. A certainty not everyone gets. And I got it.

...

I can feel it coming, the sensation of it running across my skin. "Héloïse, I love you," I start to say but I'm face-down in grass before I finish. I roll, look around quickly and start backing up to the trees behind me. There's no-one about, it's warm enough, late afternoon. All the calculations going off in my head. Vaguely familiar, it strikes me. Then not vague at all. I'm in the meadow at Héloïse's house. 

Sure enough, there's a figure approaching. It's Héloïse. She's... eleven or twelve maybe? I've never been very good with young people ages. I imagine I am going to get better. 

"Why aren't you dressed?" she demands as soon as she gets close. 

"What?"

"Get dressed."

I look around. The stone, she's told me about this. By the stone there's a bag and I shuffle over to it. Full of clothes. "Amazing," I say.

She sits patiently until I'm dressed and I sit back down near her. She puts a plate of sandwiches and a carton of orange juice in front of me. She knows the drill, far better than I do at this point. "Very amazing."

She peers at me. "You seem different."

"I'm sorry," I say, around sandwich. "It's my first time."

"Yes," she agrees, disconcerting and serious, "that seems right."

"I'm sorry," I say again. "I'll get used to it. And next time, who knows, right? It could be any of me."

"We should have written in the notebook where you came from. And how long you stayed, that would be nice to know."

"Oh. That's a really good idea. But I guess we didn't."

She sighs. "The cyclical nature of the predicament we find ourselves in."

I try very hard not to laugh. 

"How old are you?" she asks. 

"Thirty."

"That's still really old, even if it's the youngest."

"Hey!" She's acting far older than me, but I still object. 

"What's happening in the future?"

"Nope," I tell her. "Nice try."

"Fine." She looks at me. "Why are you never, like, seventy when you come?"

"I don't know, am I not?" 

"Maybe your doctor fixes you."

"My doctor?" I'm not sure what I had been expecting my upcoming visits to the meadow to be like, but not like this. 

"Yeah, we talked about time travel and you said you had a doctor for it. So maybe you figure out how to stop it. Then you won't have to come here any more."

No, no, she's sad and I'm scrambling. "Where's your notebook?"

"In my room."

"OK, well, when you get back, you look at that notebook and all the times I come to see you. Until you're a grown-up." 

"But you haven't done any of them yet."

"I can't wait though. It's exciting. Be excited for me."

She considers this. "You want to?"

"Very much."

"Good. I really want you to. Not because you already have, but because you want to."

"Well, I haven't and I want to." It's bending my brain a bit, but I suppose she is young and more open-minded, this is all perfectly normal to her. "I think we are going to have fun."

She grins. "We are. I shouldn't tell you your future though."

"That's OK, I think we can know we are going to have fun. What do you want to do?"

So we do some math homework, read, talk about school and she is showing me around the woods when I stop her. "Thank your for today," I say, she smiles, and I go. 

...

I'm on the sofa reading and beginning to think about going to bed when there's a key in the door and Marianne comes in, wearing a bus drivers' uniform. 

"Welcome back."

She comes over and kisses me, tips herself over the back of the sofa and sprawls on top of me. "How long was I gone?"

It had been just as we were sitting down to lunch. "Only earlier today."

"I've just been to the meadow," she says and she's beaming. "It was amazing." 

Her first visit to the meadow, a landmark crossed. She kisses me again, rolls off, "I'm going to get changed," and she smiles over her shoulder at me and I am full of love and gratitude and just sheer joy. 

We have begun, or made it through the beginning. Through the launch and into the gentle, easy weightlessness of orbit. Where all we have to do is float.


	4. Chapter 4

Coming home every day to a wonderful, unpredictable, time traveling nudist means that routine is tricky, but we settle into one anyway, our natural instincts overriding every other obstacle life can throw at us, even this very large one. 

When I get home Marianne comes immediately, helps me with my bag, my coat, kisses me right up against the door, no time to waste. 

If she does _not_ immediately appear, no dark mop of hair poking around the door frame from her studio, I check the table by the door. If she is absent for traditional reasons there will be a note. Where she has gone, the time... the date, which might seem excessive, but with her you never know. 

Otherwise, it is another kind of gone and I will find her clothes and other props and know what she was doing. Working in the studio. Reading on the sofa. Making dinner. Half a bowl of cereal on the table and no clothes... having breakfast in the nude. She spends a lot of time naked. This is far from a complaint. 

There doesn't seem to be much of a point to it but I track Marianne's comings and goings. I'm not privy to them all, but when I am I make a note. Where, when, what she was doing. Her mood, almost always good, on the surface, with varying levels of stress hidden below, how much sleep she had, that sort of thing. 

She already knows certain factors, stress, tiredness, alcohol, caffeine, TV. I'm searching for something and I look at these fragmented notes, '7.16pm, making dinner, 8 hours last night, singing to the radio', and I'm searching for her. Trying to find her and keep her. I can't. 

Sometimes she is gone for minutes. Sometimes for days. Neither of which corresponds to how long she has spent away. After ten minutes she could be back telling me she spent the night in the library, or three days in 1975. 

When she's not here and I go out it's my turn to leave the notes. "Gone for dinner at Sophie's" usually. Sometimes I take myself out to Beau Thai or another restaurant. Cooking for myself when she's not here can be depressing. Coming back and finding the note still on the table, the lights off, is even more so. 

The longest so far is fifteen days, continuously. It was awful, but extremely productive. "How long was I gone?" is the first thing she asks when she gets back and she isn't asking for herself, but for me, to check on me. When I tell her, fifteen days, she apologizes, as though she can help it. 

I heat her up some food and she notices how I rearranged the kitchen cupboards. "Spring cleaning," I say. It's September.

"Sounds like you had fun," she smiles, sympathetic and apologetic still. And I did and part of me needs her to know that, to know that though I miss her so very much and I worry about her, I am OK. That she doesn't need to apologize or worry about me. That I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Because every time she goes, she comes back. I'm reading or cooking and then she's behind me, putting her chin on my shoulder and I'm never surprised because part of me is always ready, wishing for that.

Sometimes she's been in a fight, which she never tells me about. But there are other reasons for the many and varied injuries. Or so she says. Running through brambles, falling out of trees, taking a tumble. Bloody lips, black eyes, swollen knuckles, bruises on her ribs, her feet cut to ribbons. 

She fights back. I know she does, I know she has to. I know she hates it. I tell her she's fighting for me, to be back here with me. That I would fight with her, for her, instead of her, if I only could. 

We have a good stash of first aid supplies at home. Butterfly closure strips are the key, half the time you go to the ER they just slap a few of these on you. So we do it ourselves. We caught a cold she brought back from 1965. Not much to do about that other than sweat it out. 

It seems to average out about one travel a week. Sometimes she doesn't travel for weeks at a time. When we first met she said it had been weeks, thought it was because she felt so attached to the present, to me. Which was _very_ romantic and richly rewarded. 

When I was a child and we were in the meadow her leaving was hard but it always felt like she was returning, going back to where she was supposed to be, to her 'real' life, where she and I were friends, and there was something comforting in that. 

Now I'm on the other side of the equation and it is wholly different. She's gone from me. When she was in the meadow with me at least she was safe. I knew where she was. Not like this. 

When she left me in the meadow, sometimes for months, then years, at a time, I knew there was the real Marianne out there. Now she is nowhere, there is no Marianne in the present and the world is poorer for it.

And I am here, alone, picking up the pieces of her. 

...

My time travel is random and involuntary, but involves a _lot_ of logistics and it's a constant project to hone those logistics, to try to streamline the process as far as possible. Not the travel. Everything else.

Héloïse and I and, in all fairness, it's mostly Héloïse, she is the mastermind here, are always working on it. It's like a project. A weird, living, science project. 

When Héloïse is with me everything is much easier, but I do still need to leave the house without her, be able to do things without her. So there are less abandoned puddles of clothes, but still some. 

Héloïse withdraws cash for me because I don't even carry a wallet. No bank cards to lose. Our building has a code for the front door and I went for years 'hiding' a spare key by my front door until Héloïse has a little key box installed with a code for that too, possibly because she actually has stuff of value that might be stolen by a thief just letting themselves into the apartment. It's handy for when I have traveled, but I use it every day. Imagine Paris being littered with multiple copies of my keys when I disappear, we'd be forever changing the locks. 

No ID either, the downsides to this being outweighed by the fact no-one can identify the woman who just vanished into thin air. Also, and I hate this, but... I have several outstanding warrants for my arrest. Got caught on occasion with the burglary and the indecent exposure and so on. Never made it all the way to processing, but some of Paris's cops can definitely recognize me and are absolutely itching to get their hands on me. I was cuffed in the back of a patrol car once when I disappeared so they know something fishy is going on. Some have seen me disappear. If they caught up with me in the present there would be no end of trouble. 

I have a favorite thrift store with very poor security that I break into and to who we give big donations. I might rob them every so often, but overall they make a profit on me. 

We keep caches of clothes and cash all over the place. In the car, at Héloïse's work, at my father's, Sophie's, hidden in bushes. I'll take any clothes I can find when I first arrive, but being able to change into something warm, that fits, really helps. Shoes, shoes are always a problem. Right size, comfortable, something I can make a quick getaway in.

We can make all these preparations, but there's nothing we can do to change the fact of it. That, sooner or later, I'm off again. Which is an inconvenience in itself. Never mind vanishing off a packed Metro train, out of the school hall during an exam, the back of the aforementioned police car. 

Little things, too. One time I traveled while running a bath and flooded the place. Mostly I get a warning, the creeping feeling of it coming on. Enough to turn off the tap or the cooker. Enough to tell Héloïse I love her.

...

We are just getting ready for bed when there is the knock on the door and a key turning in the lock. Marianne, her toothbrush sticking out her mouth, looks at me and goes into the lounge. I follow. 

There she is, closing the front door, dressed only in a coat, feet bare. "Hey," she says.

"Hey," Marianne says and goes to fetch some clothes.

"I'll put the kettle on. Come in." I wave her forward. 

She's young and nervous and shy and I love her so much. She shuffles into the living room. 

"It's January 1994. Where are you coming from?" Marianne is back, handing over clothes.

"October 1991. Too late and cold to have much fun in the future."

"Oh, I don't know about that," my Marianne replies.

"It's a really nice place you have here," she says. 

I realize her date, it's early, very early. "You don't live here yet. How did you know to come?"

Marianne says, "I passed the message back." Which makes a lot of sense. It's not about knowing the future so much as being safe, warm, fed and clothed. I love the idea of our home being a haven for her, in place and time. 

I remember how, when we were house hunting, Marianne's eyes lit up before we even got in the door of this place. "Wait a minute. You knew, when we were looking at apartments, that we would end up here?" I swat at her and her sheepish grin. "You monster. All that time we could have saved."

She raises her hands in surrender. "You were enjoying yourself. I wanted you to choose, to have that."

"Wow," says the younger Marianne on the sofa. "Really an old married couple, huh?"

"Don't call your hosts old." Marianne points a finger at her.

I laugh, bring through three herbal teas. Marianne's disgusting habits are wearing me down. 

We sit and chat for a while, under blankets, getting warm and comfortable. Until our visitor yawns and I can't help it, I'm sat next to her, looking at her, and it's an instinct, a reflex, I reach out and stroke her cheek. She freezes, looks over my shoulder at her counterpart. I do too. Marianne nods at us. 

The other Marianne draws me in and kisses me. Behind me, my Marianne moves closer. I shuffle back to feel her against me. Her arms go around me, even as her hands are in my hair. 

"Are you sure?" Marianne whispers in my ear and I nod frantically. 

She already knows her own mind and I am rapidly losing mine as someone's hands go under my sweater and undo my bra. 

I turn, straddle my Marianne's lap. "Are you?"

"Yes," they breathe in unison.

So I kiss her, pull off her shirt. And the other, identical shirt. And my sweater, carefully, not touching one another, just me, in the center of it all. Marianne's mouth is on my breasts and my neck is being kissed.

I am surrounded, lavished with attention, borne away with love and desire. And everything is Marianne, she is everywhere and everything.

... 

Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of visiting Héloïse in the meadow. _Especially_ teenage Héloïse who is a barrage, an onslaught I am constantly struggling to keep up with, particularly at the beginning, which isn't helped by the fact my early years don't correspond with anything for her. 

Right now we are in the meadow, lounging on a blanket. She brought down a full hamper of food which I was very grateful for, as well as some jigsaw puzzles and other entertainment she has since refused to engage with. She's sixteen, in a few months her father will be gone, she's angsting about college, she is experiencing everything very intensely. 

"Are you married?" she asks.

"That falls well within the no-future rules." 

"I'm not asking about _my_ future. Just yours," she pouts. 

Bless her that she does not know, cannot know, that our futures are one and the same. I just wait her out, not knowing what else to do. 

"Fine!" she huffs. "What about right now, out there?"

"Am I married, at sixteen? No."

She glowers in that way only teenagers can. "Dating." 

I cast my mind back, that summer... "Mm, Ben. His mom coached the girls' soccer team." To call it dating would be quite a stretch, but we thought we were, at the time. When in fact we were just awkwardly holding hands in various locations because I refused to go to the movies with him, or get in his car, or do any of the things a girlfriend was supposed to do. He ended up spreading it around school that I was frigid and somehow that seemed preferable to time traveler. 

Héloïse sits up, frowning. She fixes her gaze on a point toward the house and keeps it there. 

"What's wrong?" I have to ask, constantly concerned I have irreparably damaged her in some way.

She's still looking away. "I guess I just thought... I thought maybe you were like me." 

I'm certain we've never talked about this, here in Héloïse's present. I know she's been thinking about it for years and this pains me, it pains me not to be able to help though I don't know what I could do to help. She confides so much in me, but not this, she won't talk to me about this because I _am_ this, the chief instigator of this. I don't want her to carry it alone, but I don't know how I can help her with it. Without telling her that in the future we are as good as married. Even that, us, is twelve years away for her. 

I could say, "I am," but I'm not, except I am. That's not the future, that's me, here in 1979, having very similar angsts to those she is, but without the clarity of boys being unilaterally gross. 

"I didn't want to be on my own," she says, her eyes brimming with tears that she is fighting to hold back. 

"You won't be," I tell her forcefully, without thinking about it. 

She smiles ruefully, a tear falls. "Is that my future?"

"I could tell you that now without knowing your future. How you feel... it doesn't mean you have to be alone. And you are too special not to have lots of people who love you." It's as vague as I can make it and could perhaps pass for the wishful-thinking reassurances any adult might give a child, a young person, on the cusp of a terrifying future.

Accordingly, it fails to make a lot of impact with her, but she stops crying at least.

"As long as we're friends," she says.

"Yes." My voices is thick and my heart aches for her, we're friends, we're everything. 

...

Marianne thumps into the grass in the meadow. Dusk is falling, I brought a torch with me. "Hello," she says from behind me and I remain turned away. Sometimes I can't help it, sometimes there is a glimpse of her before she gets into her clothes, sometimes more than a glimpse. I can't help it. But for the most part, I don't look.

I hear her unzip the bag. "Oh," she says and I am sure, from her voice, that she already senses something is afoot. "These are new."

"Yes," I say as casually as possible. They are indeed new, actually new. I bought them for her. I stood in the store and tried to picture her in anything other than sweatpants or chinos and that cardigan. But if I could choose anything for her to wear it would be that. I wonder what she would choose for herself and realize that I have no idea. 

She gets dressed and comes to stand by me. She's young, for her. I tease her about her age sometimes and she just smiles. 

"Where am I?" she asks, meaning where in time. 

"March 29, 1981."

"It was just your birthday," she beams. "Happy birthday!" 

I feel shy all of a sudden. She gives me a hug. I close my eyes. It's over too soon.

"So," I begin, moving away from her, because I have to, "it's also my friend Helen's birthday, today. She's having a party."

Marianne is trying, and failing, not to smile. She is trying to be an adult and disapproving and so on. "OK..." she says. 

"And I want us to go."

"Ah." She looks down at the clothes. "What kind of party?"

"An eighteenth birthday party kind of party."

"Are her parents home?"

"No, that's sort of the appeal."

"I know those sorts of parties." 

I can see her calculating in her head. We very rarely leave the grounds, she is weighing the risk of that, the risk of being out with me, with the risk _to_ me in general. I am, at this age, and probably still now, a renowned little shit, so I double down on this concern. "There's going to be alcohol." 

"I can imagine."

"Hey, do you think you would get carded? How old are you?"

"Thirty-two. And it doesn't matter, because I am not buying you alcohol."

I sigh, but it's all a pantomime and she knows it, smiles. There's only fourteen years between us. This is the closest in age we've ever been. Probably will be, until we meet for real. The thought of that meeting sinks in the pit of my stomach. How far away it is. How different it will be. I ignore it. 

"And I can't go to the party."

I throw a full pout. "Why? We never do anything fun."

She ignores the provocation, is only patient. "Because in about ten years time I'm going to meet Helen for real and she's probably going to wonder why I haven't aged a day, am in fact _younger_ than I am now." Gently, she says, "I don't do these things, have these rules, to annoy you. They might seem complicated and silly, but they make things a lot less complicated in the long run." 

It makes sense, I hadn't even considered the possibility Marianne might know my friends in the future, and I love it, but I hate it, so I argue the case anyway. "They'll be drunk, no-one will remember."

"You should go."

"Not while you are here." There are only two more visits, I'm not wasting them away from her. No, instead I'm here, wasting them in her company by sulking. 

"How about..." she says, already looking like she is having doubts, "I come with you _just_ as far as the house. I'll wait in the car."

I could jump for joy, but, at eighteen, believe myself very mature. That's probably the peak of my belief in my maturity and adulthood. 

I drive us there and Marianne white knuckles it the whole way. "I'm not that bad a driver," I say. 

"It's not you," she says. "I'm not a good passenger." I cannot believe, now, writing this, that, given her fear of driving, she ever got in the car with eighteen-year-old me at all. But then she would have felt she had to explain why she disliked driving and she would never do that to me. She asks me about college instead. 

I park down the block from Helen's house, trying to be discreet about it. There's not much discreet about the thumping music and the teenage boys spilling out of the house. 

"Mm-hm," Marianne says. "I remember this."

"All that time ago?"

She grins at me. "You'll be thirty-two one day, you know, you young whippersnapper."

"And will I be _very_ boring?"

"Yes, the most boring," she says so seriously I know she must be teasing me. 

Unlike my very visible aging I can only really date her to the extremes. When she is younger, like now, or older. In the middle, most of the time, she just looks like Marianne. 

It occurs to me that I know parts of her future that she doesn't. She holds so much of mine. I only have scraps. But this Marianne sitting next to me now, all energy and verve, does she know how tired she is going to get? Who she is going to become? I do. The winter before last, before I went to college, we were in the Reading Room. She said she had been ill and she had looked it. It's not a pleasant sensation at all and I feel a sudden surge of sympathy for her, for her probably always feeling like this around me. 

I don't want to go, I just want to stay here with her. But she wants me to, she doesn't want me to miss out. It would be good to see Helen, if indeed we are going to be friends in ten years time I should probably put in the effort. "Don't go anywhere," I tell Marianne. 

Who smiles and says, "I will do my best. Go, have fun." 

So I go. I pass into the living room. The testosterone is palpable, the dresses are short. I see Helen, who I haven't seen in months, since we were all back at Christmas, wish her a happy birthday and say hello to some of the others. 

It's all deeply uninteresting to me, an urbane Parisian college student, all of eighteen. It feels like high school except we are all so straight-laced up here we never did this in high school. It's a college party, with everyone from high school, most of whom I hated. 

There's only one place I want to be, sat in the car with Marianne. Or, even more ideally, if we are talking about wanting, having her here. Getting her to dance with me, but she would never. Kissing her in the crush of bodies and not caring because there is only her in the whole world.

Instead, I leave, go back to the car where she is reading, still there, thank God, I can't believe I risked it. I drive her to the beach and it's dark now so we can hardly see the sea, but we can hear it. It shushes us gently as we talk and I bask in her, I revel in her and practice being here, now, not worrying about what is to come. It's perfect, perfect moments that I inhabit fully and when she has gone I gather up her clothes and hold her to me and I don't cry, I smile. 

...

When she turns thirty-five I make Marianne a presentation of the notebook. Nearly two hundred dates in her own handwriting, from 1969 to 1983. 

"I have to remember all these?"

"You will."

"What if I make a mistake?"

"You don't," and we are back to discussing determinism and free will and I'm putting my philosophy major to good use. 

At the time I just aged her as "a grown-up" but I can see that meeting in my mind so clearly and I can see it coming for her. 

"A grown-up?" she cries, offended, when I tell her, and I kiss her.

She swots over that notebook though I know she has a good memory because she keeps everything in there anyway and I'm not worried. 

One day, several months later, as it turns out, she arrives back. "You just met me for the first time," she says, eyes full. 

"I remember," I say. I remember the tentative conversation with a naked lady. I remember how dramatic it was when I saw her vanish. I remember being glad when she said she'd come back. 

But something isn't right. She avoids my eye as she goes to the bedroom. I follow her in. "What's wrong?"

"It's just, what if that was wrong? I'm scared I've done the wrong thing."

"No," is all I can say, watching her get dressed. She's upset and frustrated, which is far rarer on her than you would expect for someone being tossed about in time against her will. 

"I should have hidden, walked away. What was I thinking? It was selfish. I loved you and I wanted you to love me so I took your whole childhood." 

I am aghast. "You are the least selfish person I know. You wanted to look after me. You saw a child who needed someone, needed you. And you looked after me, you _gave_ me a childhood." She does not look convinced and leaves the room, I pursue her to the kitchen. "You want someone to blame for this you blame me, blame me in the library telling you what you were going to do in your future. It was me being selfish. I loved _you_ and I wanted you to love me so I took your free will and your future and I put myself there." 

"I wanted you to be there," she says, helplessly. 

I point to a chair and go to the fridge and pull out an enormous container of pasta, dump it into a bowl, put it in the microwave. I turn back to her, where she is obediently sitting, her head in her hands. "And I want you to find me in the meadow. Not because I knew you would or you already had. Because I love you and I don't want to be without you." The microwave beeps, I stir the pasta about, take it over to her.

"Thank you," she says quietly, a momentary interlude. 

I look at her. "I could walk out that door right now and never come back. Yes, I love you, but I could still leave. And maybe you would keep going back to the meadow because you already had and because you love me too. And you would never have told me, you would have protected me, like you did with so many things."

"But if this had never even begun... You would have had real choices."

"I always had a choice and I chose you. I choose you every day." Now I am far more worked up than she is. 

She smiles. "It feels bizarre to be so happy with the idea you would leave."

"Honestly, I don't know what you take me for," I mutter darkly, though smiling a little too. "Thinking I would let myself be unhappy." 

I go over to her, put my arms around her shoulders, hold her to me. "I love you," I say into her hair. "It doesn't matter how or why or when it started. I love you, always." 

"And I love you," she says, a bit muffled. "Everywhere I go, I love you."

...

That sinking feeling of knowing I'm going to travel. I let myself get too tired, that's what it was. But I was happy, lying on the couch with Héloïse at the other end, our feet tangling together. I didn't want an early night or anything sensible, I just wanted her. 

But I sit up, look around and I'm in the meadow. It makes me smile and I get up to go to the stone for the bag of clothes. Which is not there. 

"Marianne!" Héloïse is coming over the hill from the house. She's running to me. She's older, she's not a teenager even, and I realize when this must be. The last time I go to the meadow, for her. It's been two years since she's seen me, but I was with her just now and it kills me how unfair it is for her. 

She hugs me but I'm still very naked and this has not happened before. It seems to take a moment for her to catch onto this, but when she does she suddenly becomes very still and, goddamn me, but I don't move away. Her arms were around my shoulders, but they move and her hands are on the back of my neck, slipping across skin with intent. She puts her head back and looks at me, all over me, into me. 

"Héloïse..." I say, but there's enough warning in my voice for it to not sound entirely lusty. She touches my face and I get ready to object again, but then she moves further away. 

"Your clothes," and she goes back to where she had dropped them breaking into a run. She doesn't look at me as I take them from her, goes away and sits in the grass. "I didn't bring the bag. I guess we don't need it anymore."

When I'm dressed I sit down nearby. Not too close, giving her some space.

She looks at me. "We won't need those either. I should probably burn them."

I don't object because I know she doesn't. I first wore this cardigan in 1969 and I'm still wearing it now, in 1999. 

I wait until she looks away. "How are you? How is college?"

"Fine."

"Good." 

Héloïse laughs sharply, then puts her head in her hands. "I hate it. Why can't I time travel, just skip the next eight years?"

I move over to her. Put an arm around her but she shrugs me off.

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize." The words sound encouraging but she is furious. "Tell me where you are! Let me come to you. Then you won't need to be sorry."

My mouth opens and closes. I want to. The idea of us meeting at twenty, instead, of sparing her those years, of sparing _myself_ those years, giving us that extra time together... in so many ways I want nothing more. "I can't. This is just how things are."

"Easy for you to say. It's not been two years for you. It's not _going_ to be eight."

"I know. You're right." She is right, of course. But I was so aware of everything she didn't know, couldn't know. She didn't know how much I loved her. She didn't know we were in love, how we were together, I couldn't burden her with that. Maybe it would have helped, maybe not. No way to know. We've gone over this so many times, she and I. 

"You're going to be alright. This is good, it's important. Time for you to be yourself, learn about yourself without me accidentally dropping hints all the time." That makes her smile a little, though she's mad about it. "Live your life, enjoy yourself."

"What am I like, when we meet again?"

"Fierce. Accomplished. But you have to remember, it won't be 'again' for me. I won't know you, won't know about any of this. Be gentle with me, please."

She nods her head.

"Don't wait for me, Héloïse," is my final request as I start to go. She's reaching for me, tears streaming.

I hit the floor in the bathroom. Héloïse is in the tub. "Welcome back," she says, peering over at me. 

I lie on my back looking up at her. "How long was I gone?"

"About half an hour. Where did you go? You're clean at least."

"Can I still get in the bath if I'm clean?"

"Be my guest." The water slops as she moves, then again as I clamber in. I lie against her front. She rubs my shoulders and it is heavenly. I feel awful for the Héloïse I just left.

"I was in the meadow," I say and she hums happily. She likes those visits, knowing I was safe, a chance to reminisce and part of the jigsaw puzzle of our shared history slotting into place for me.

Until I ruin it. "1983. You were home from college."

She stiffens for a moment. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I was such a little shit."

"No, I'm sorry."

She ignores me and carries on, which she does a lot. Brushes off my reassurances. I keep doing it anyway. "I hated myself that I had wasted that time with you," she says. 

"No."

"I did. I was in a temper for two months, not to mention miserable, and then every time I thought about how long there was left, every time I thought about you, which was every day, I hated myself all over again."

"My love, no."

"You were right though."

"Was I?"

"I needed that time and space. As much as I would have loved that time with you."

"Me too. I wanted to tell you. But I physically couldn't. I knew it wouldn't have worked." 

"Why do you think you never visited me, in all those years?"

"You know I would, if I could."

"I know, sweetheart, I'm only curious."

"I don't know. You were moving around a lot. I've not been to any of those places you were, not that I only go to places I've been. But the meadow, your family house, that is somewhere I know, something I link to you. The gravitational pull of you, there, like the accident, brings me back in over and over. And you didn't need me in your twenties like you did then."

"I did," she says, very small. She kisses my shoulder and her arms are tighter around me, a reflex, hanging on. 

"I'm sorry," I say again, uselessly, and she laughs into me. "I wish I could have seen you then, too. You go from being that angry twenty-year-old to, well, that angry twenty-eight-year-old. But you were so different."

"You want to try going from you being forty-something to seeing you at twenty-eight. Talk about different." She pauses. "You want to know about those years?"

"If you want to tell me."

She hasn't told me an awful lot, I think, because she was waiting for this. For me to have her last meeting with me. In the strange way that these things happen. I will have many more with her in the meadow, but that's the oldest I see her until we converged in the present. Until the library, it was the last memory she had of me. 

"Well, I was a total cow for the rest of the summer break. Mama threatened to take me to her new therapist, the fervor of the new convert. So that didn't help, her being all sanctimonious and finally taking an interest in me after twenty years. So I was mad about that all being too little too late. Then I went back to college and everything just felt rather bleak and pointless for a while. Eight years at that age feels like a lifetime. Twenty-eight felt ancient."

Interestingly, I didn't really feel like that about my ages. I regularly saw versions of myself that were older and younger and it just felt sort of normal. I knew I wasn't a radically different person, that I did not suddenly become An Adult, that me at forty was almost as clueless as me at twenty. And that in many ways I was all those people, all at once. 

"Then I met Sophie, so as you can imagine that was a terrible corruption, but a great distraction. So I failed a couple classes, which scared this overachiever straight. I found a bit of balance, eventually. I missed you so much but there was nothing I could do about it and I wanted to be someone interesting when I met you. You told me to live. So I did my MLS and training and interning and all that."

I'm just nodding along. 

"I went on a few dates. I thought I at least ought to know what I was doing for when I finally did meet you. If... you know, in case there was any chance. Which of course didn't help at all because none of them were you and all I really wanted was you and I'm afraid I treated most of them rather badly because of it. Not _badly_ badly, it's just that I was never really there, never really in it, and they would break it off and I would be unmoved. I just wanted the fun bits, I guess, while I was waiting. Not a real relationship."

I'm still nodding, encouraging, letting her know I understand. 

"I was absolutely wracked with fear that you wouldn't like me. You'd only ever said we knew each other, I think you said 'friends' a few times but that was as far as you went. And I had been horribly in love with you since I was about fourteen. Don't say you're sorry, I know you are sorry."

She can see the pained objections piling up in my mind and cuts them off at the pass. "You were always the perfect gentlewoman, you never did anything to encourage me, it was all myself. And I know why you wouldn't, couldn't, tell me. Knowing what I do now I think you were right. But then it was a torture. If I had known this was waiting for me..." 

She's kissing my neck, her hands all over me as I writhe with desire. There's a flash of guilt about the twenty-year old I just left in a meadow, but she's here, now, having her wicked way with me, and I let her. 

...

I get home and we have a visitor, the pair of them are sitting at the table doing accounts. As a reward for their diligence and hard work I take them to bed. More accurately, I allow them to take me to bed. Marianne still keeps distance from herself while in the act and though I have a burning desire to witness this I never address the matter. I am generally far too distracted. I lie there, one sleeping Marianne nestled against my chest, another holding me from behind and I am overwhelmed by her. 

I'm aware that somewhere out there in time this means I am alone. 

I don't wait for Marianne when she travels. I have too much to do. I have a life to live, job to do, books to read, friends to see, places to go, new things to learn. I stay busy, I enjoy myself.

Part of me is always waiting for her. Always has been, always will be.

She sees me at six and she sees me at twenty and somehow she manages to make it seem, to both younger me and me now, like it's all perfectly OK. Just effortlessly gentle and patient and kind. No matter the moods the seventeen-year-old me was in and coming back to the thirty-seven-year-old me ranting about work or stressed about something pettily domestic. She just loves me. Every day she loves me and I do my best to be worthy of it. 

The gaps get filled in. My past becomes her past and the books we read, things we talked about, games we played, little jokes we had, all come together. She sees items here in the present with new eyes, a new filter to habits, she can date things and we reminisce about times both decades and moments ago. 

...

Marianne has a headache and is taking some tablets when she says, "Héloïse," and the glass smashes.

Before I can even pick up her clothes she's back, kneeling in broken glass, and is gone again. 

Two of my ragged breaths and she's back, stays long enough to vomit and goes. I'm scrabbling on my hands and knees trying to clear everything. 

She's back, almost on top of me. I hold onto her shoulders and she looks at me with a fear in her eyes that I've never seen before. Then she's gone and my arms just hold air. 

This has never happened before. 

I wait. When she's not back within a minute I get the brush and mop and clean up. I sit on the floor in the kitchen. If she comes back, I think, I will hold onto her and not let her go. It will have to let her stay, or take me with her, or take me instead. I demand it of the universe. She has suffered enough.

It's starting to get dark when there's that snapping sound and she's back, sprawled on the floor. I launch myself at her. She's woozy, eyes half-open, muttering and there's dry blood caked on her hands and knees, in her hair. She doesn't disappear though.

"Shhh, sweetheart, you're home, I'm here."

It takes her a moment, but she focuses on me and smiles. "How long was I gone?" she asks and we are back on track, back into the usual routine. 

I put her in the bath, wash her hair, she is happy and relaxed. I towel her down, make her laugh and I think all this fussing is as much for me as it is for her. That I need it, more, possibly.

We lie in bed, I am wrapped around her, her skin is cool. "I think it might be time to start looking for this doctor of yours."

She yawns, nods, nuzzles against me and falls asleep. 

... 

Dr. Kendrick is a geneticist, has written several well-reviewed papers, Héloïse has checked his credentials thoroughly. He's also the only person who doesn't immediately toss me out the office when I walk in and say I can time travel. 

"You call it chrono-impairment," Héloïse says. "Well, you will now. But that's what Marianne told me."

"In the past?" he attempts to clarify. 

It's the first I've heard of it. "Héloïse's past. My future."

Héloïse does her best to explain, she actually does a really good job, but he is understandably skeptical. I start to think how awful this whole thing is and I'm not sure I even want or need a doctor, all my life I have avoided this from a fear of being poked and prodded and the thought of it sends a shiver down my spine. Héloïse looks at me sharply and I feel more than just that shiver. "Oh, I..." and I materialize on the soccer pitch at my old high school. I whoop, then run. 

That night when I make it home Héloïse is very impressed with my totally involuntary traveling. "I think we might have him," she says. 

"All worthwhile then," I say around the ice pack on the black eye a father felt compelled to give the streaker at his son's game. 

As I had feared there are a barrage of tests and I hate it, but I am doing this for Héloïse. Dr. Kendrick is good fun and it's interesting to talk about this from a medical standpoint, though we pack plenty of philosophy in, especially when Héloïse is there.

There are blood tests, swabs, collecting DNA, stress tests, sleep observations. I had to deliberately stay awake for the sleep observation and felt like crap when we arrived at the lab, absolutely convinced I would travel. And I did, in bed hooked up to monitors with Dr. Kendrick and Héloïse the other side of a mirror. 

I go and potter around on the north coast circa 1990 for a few days and when I get back they have barely made it into the room. I'm on the floor, all the sticky pads and velcro wrappings, not to mention my pajamas, remain on the bed. Dr. Kendrick is thrilled, but I have a sore head and have eaten far too much fish and am still very tired. Héloïse takes me home and holds me and I sleep for a full twenty-four hours. 

This is for her. It's not that I _like_ traveling exactly, but I'll not deny it has its perks. Chief among them being that I get to meet Héloïse. That I get to spend time with her in the past, that in whichever weird cyclical way we meet and fall in love. 

Other things too. I see my mom. I've seen her and my dad playing, I've seen her carrying me down the street when I was a baby, I've sat next to her on the Metro.

I've seen the future, which is both horrifying and wonderful. 

But it's hard. It's so hard. I try to make the most of it because what choice do I have? But it's getting harder and harder to spin being away from Héloïse, missing her, knowing she is missing me, that we are missing time together. When she is all and everything that I want.


	5. Chapter 5

It's been six hours and I'm cleaning the kitchen when there's a muffled thump in the living room. My heart soars. I turn around and there Marianne is, hunched over by the sofa as she vomits. Her back is to me and I can see shoulder blades far too sharp, her ribs, vertebrae, in alarming detail. She turns too, sees me, immediately there are tears. 

I run to her, scoop her up. "Are you hurt?" I can feel too much of her. I look into her face, wipe the tears with my thumbs, she is sallow, so dark under her eyes, her hair is noticeably longer. She never cries, she does not linger, when she returns she throws herself into the business of being here, now. 

"How long was I gone?"

"A few hours."

She cracks again. "Good," she says through the tears. "That's good." It's evidently been much longer for her, but she had been scared it was even longer for me. 

Eventually, when we are lying on the sofa and I'm cradling her on my chest, I whisper, "Where were you?" 

"1952, for ten weeks," she says. "It was hard." This last part I already knew. 

I tighten my arms around her. "Oh, sweetheart."

"I even got drunk trying to trigger it." 

"You're home now."

"I am," and she presses her face into me.

We don't know it at the time, thank God, we don't know what's coming, but now I look back and I think, there, that was the beginning of the end. 

...

Héloïse is not impressed with turning forty and not impressed with how I take it in my stride. Time moves around us as much as we move through it. I am becoming more circumspect, "in my old age," I say to tease her, like she teases me in the meadow for being old, forgetting that somewhere we are the same age. 

The truth is, I start to feel it. I'm not on top form. I had a bit of a rough time a few months before, but I'm doing a lot better now. It's just that every time I travel it takes a little more from me. 

Yesterday I was practicing lockpicking with my eight-year-old self. Now I'm teaching Sophie's two little tearaways, in the present. It's a useful life skill, I point out when Sophie looks skeptical, but she is not going to argue with someone keeping them busy for a few hours and thus out of her way while she and Héloïse chat in the kitchen, even if it is by tutoring them in delinquency. For fairly obvious reasons I am not left in sole charge of the children, though my babysitting doesn't seem to have done myself or Héloïse much harm.

Héloïse visits us, as we sit around the coffee table deep in concentration coaxing tumblers. 

"I'm so proud of my little criminals," she says. I think she wishes sometimes that little-me would travel to her in some sort of reciprocation. I would have loved that too. 

...

It's Friday night, just an ordinary Friday night and I want to go out, like ordinary people do. Marianne does not. 

"I'm sorry, I'm just tired. You go, have fun."

The thing is, I want to be with her, I want to do normal things with her like go out with our friends. It feels as though this has been in short supply lately what with the intensifying doctor's visits, the intensifying traveling, the intensifying everything. I also wonder if I'm not having some sort of mid-life crisis, an early mid-life crisis I would hasten to add, and am railing against moving up a decade.

Marianne agrees because Marianne always agrees and we go to a bar, meet Sophie and some other people and she does her very best, so much that it makes my heart ache. 

I find her sitting in a booth, a glass of water in front of her. Looking at her now she's dead on her feet. Her eyes can barely focus, her gaze just meanders. I slide next to her, cup her cheek. "I'm sorry," I whisper. "It's selfish of me. Let me take you home." 

She shakes her head. "I'm going." 

I look around, try to gauge if we can get to the bathroom or somewhere more private. 

"I love you," she says and is gone before I can reply. My hand hovers in the air and I quickly scoop her clothes into my satchel, look around to check if anyone has seen. It's amazing how a person can just disappear from a packed bar with no-one noticing. Vanish into thin air. Out of existence and the world just carries on. Apart from mine. 

I find Sophie. "I'm going home." 

"Where's Marianne?" 

I hold up her shoes. "She's already gone." 

"Damn. You sure you won't stay, then?" 

"No, I think I'd better get back home." 

I feel utterly miserable on the Metro and getting home hoping she is there already, when she isn't. I run a bath and hope desperately that she will arrive. I get into bed and can't sleep. 

The next day I am a zombie at work and Matt covers a talk for me so I owe him, but I don't have the energy to think about anything other than Marianne. Where she is, how she is, how this is my fault. After work, I call home and when she doesn't pick up I leave a message on the machine telling her I'm going to eat at Beau Thai and to call my cell the moment she gets back. When I get home I delete the message. 

It's three o'clock at night and I am lying on the sofa, reluctant to go to bed, half-dozing, when the phone rings. "Marianne?" 

"Can you come get me?" 

Oh, thank God. "Where are you, my love?" 

"The museum of modern art."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes." At least there's minimal traffic at 3am. "Sit tight. I love you."

When I get there she is wrapped in an abandoned picnic blanket, slumped against the phone box. As I load her into the car two police officers come past and she has narrowly missed being picked up for drunk and disorderly conduct or whatever they would try to claim. She's in no state to be dodging them now. 

"Are you hurt?" I ask her. 

"No. I don't think so."

I switch the light on and she winces. She's absolutely filthy, one eye swollen closed, and she smells like she's just come via the sewer, with a side of vomit. I say nothing about any of this, obviously, and the most important thing is that she is not bleeding or missing a limb or anything like that. 

There are clothes on the back seat that I hand to her, but she doesn't respond, they just stay in her lap. I put my hand to the back of her neck, toy with her hair there, but she barely responds to that either. I drive off, she needs to get home. It's silence the whole way and I am terrified she is angry and blaming me, like I am myself.

At home, I help her out of the car and inside. She's leaning heavily on me, limping.

"Do you want a bath?"

She nods. I leave her in the living room on the sofa while I run the bath, gather our medical supplies. She's just staring at the floor, still in the picnic mat. "Do you need something to eat? Drink?"

She shakes her head. Then, "Where is she?"

I pause in the doorway. "Who?"

"Your Marianne." She looks at me, looks lost.

I'm instantly by her side, stroking her hair. "You, sweetheart, you're home." She always snaps back to her present. She doesn't travel within travels. At least, she hasn't. Or is she travelling now and this is the state she was in, in her present? A world of new, horrible possibilities open up. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Her face is a blank. "I don't."

It's terrifying, but I refuse to be terrified. "Bath and then bed," I prescribe, needing to act. 

In the bath, she sits with her knees up, like she is guarding herself against me. I scrub at her, then hose her down with the shower for good measure. In a towel, she sits on the edge of the tub and I check her over. A few cuts, one of which is an unpleasant yellowing color. I dab at her with antiseptic. Her eye isn't a bruise, it's an infection of some sort. She takes some painkillers. 

"What happened?" I ask her. 

"I don't know," she says.

"Let me make you something to eat."

"I'm not hungry." 

Never in all the thirty-five years I've known her have I ever heard her utter those words. "Just a sandwich?"

"No. Thank you."

I think about pushing the matter. I don't. I put a hand on her shoulder and guide her to the bed. It's dawn now, I will be calling in sick in an hour or two. 

Marianne gets into bed, facing away from me. I perch on the edge. "Do you need anything?"

"No. Thank you." 

There's a moment of gratitude that it isn't always like this. That it isn't always so much worse. I appreciate, really appreciate right in my bones, for the first time, how hard she works to make me feel OK about all this.

I get into bed behind her, put an arm around her. She's stiff, but she lets me and soon she is asleep. 

When I wake up she's not there and I could cry except that I hear a bang in the kitchen and am immediately on my feet and through the bedroom door. 

"Afternoon," she grins, lit up by the sun streaming in through the windows, blinds open even though she is stark naked. "Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," she says as she puts the pan down, comes toward me.

She's back, she's actually back. Her eye is still swollen, it's the same her, but she, herself, is back. I wrap my arms around her tightly. "You're back."

"Did you not see me, I thought... actually, you know, it's strange, I can't quite remember."

"Do you remember where you were before you travelled?"

"At the bar, with Sophie and everyone. When was that?"

"Two nights ago."

She nods. 

"Was it my fault?" I ask the question I've spent all that time berating myself over. 

She's startled. "No, of course not."

"You didn't want to go out and I made you. You should have told me no." This is unfair of me because I know she wouldn't and I know how forceful I was about it. 

"I hate stopping you from having fun." 

"I don't care about that. I only care about you."

"I care about _you_ and part of that is you having fun."

I'm looking at her now, running my fingers across her cheeks. 

She puts her hand to her eye. "Do I look like an absolute monster?"

"I've seen worse," I say, and I kiss her. 

We go to the doctor and she has to take a seven-day course of antibiotics but, inevitably, she's away for three days, her body time, in the middle of that so she begins again and the whole thing is hard for her, I know, even though she doesn't let on at all. But we know she's not bouncing back like she used to. I hadn't wanted to accept how things were changing, how she was coming apart and that there was nothing I could do about it.

...

Héloïse is hauling Dr. Kendrick over the coals. She thinks the drugs might be to blame for some sort of memory loss, I don't know.

"If she's traveling and she can't remember who she is or what's going on..." Héloïse says.

Dr. Kendrick waits patiently for Héloïse to finish her rant because he values his life.

I love her and it tears me up to cause her this sort of pain. 

Things are actually going well with the medical stuff. Dr. Kendrick thinks it's something akin to epilepsy and is trying me on various anti-seizure drugs to varying success. Well, little success, but varying degrees of working from not-at-all to possibly-making-things-worse. The real success is coming from understanding what's going on, isolating the chronological genes and so on. He's talking about making time traveling mice. That this could have repercussions in many different areas, help lots of different people, even if not time travelers. If my traveling can contribute to advances in geriatrics or premature ageing or any of the things Dr. Kendrick talks about then that's a big entry in the 'pro' column. 

Héloïse has less patience for this side of the equation. She's thinking only of me and I know it's because she worries. She worries we have left it too late. Whereas I am getting more and more settled into the fateful pre-determination of it all. 

"Next time you go back, you tell her she has to find Kendrick, get started with this right away."

I open my arms in helplessness. "I can't, can I. Because I didn't. And I've thought about it, tried. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Just like all the other times."

I've tried to change things. But the past has already happened and the future... well. I've been there, seen things, done things and so in a way it becomes my past before it has happened. Maybe it's because I'm tired, but I can't fight it anymore. I'm so tired of fighting. I just want to be.

Every time a little more, until there will be nothing left. 

...

Marianne is getting thin. She doesn't eat, says she doesn't have an appetite. She lost all that weight when she was away for two months, two years ago, and she put some back on, but not all. She never really got back to her fighting weight and now it's coming off again. 

Her metabolism is extraordinary, I remember how ravenous she always was after travelling in either direction. Now, more often than not, she's sick instead. But she gets thinner so it still must need all that energy. I shudder to think what she eats when she's traveling. I know it's always hard for her, a preoccupation, where and how to get food, but maybe now she just skips it.

I'm looking at her, she's reading at the other end of the sofa, one thin, long hand poised above ready to turn the page. It makes her look older. Or she is older. 

We're forty-two, but goodness knows how much extra time Marianne has lived. Or maybe not, maybe she's in debit and it's just the strain. Around her eyes, shadows of lines on her forehead. Dark circles under her eyes. The grey in her hair. Me too, obviously, here and there, but hers is so dark it stands out more. No, there is more. She's under a blanket wearing a sweater _and_ cardigan right now. She's always cold. And always tired. And always pretending not to be. 

She looks up and sees me watching her. "What?" she asks as though it's strange for me to be gazing at her, bemused by the concept I should want to do so. 

"You're beautiful," I tell her and she waves it away, blushing. "I love you," I add. 

She looks back at me, so serious. "I love you too." 

...

A horn blares as I get my bearings. I'm not face down on a road, thank goodness, but I move as quick as I can. I'm next to a road, a highway and when I get behind a bush I have a proper look around. My heart sinks. It's the grass verge by the intersection on the highway where, at some point, a six-year-old me will be spat out of a car wreck. But not now. Today is warm and sunny and this is not uncommon. Same place, different time, nor is same time but different place.

I'm not as quick or as stealthy as I should be as I make my way up and across the verge. The telecoms box under which I try to maintain a stash of clothes, which is difficult this far back, doesn't exist yet, so that and the style of the cars give me an approximate date, pre-1975, maybe late 60s. 

I push through the hedge so I'm away from the road and follow it about a mile to a rest stop where I prowl through the parking lot, nude, trying car doors until I assemble enough clothes to pass for an outfit. Then I hitch a ride back into Paris, the ease of hitchhiking being a very real advantage in these days.

I'm hungry, but the thought of actually eating turns my stomach. I have a look at my chauffeur's newspaper. It's July 1968, my mom is still alive.

This provokes a wave of sadness, as well as joy. Back here I am totally alone. I haven't traveled yet, not until next year. I haven't visited Héloïse in the meadow yet. No-one knows me even though they are right there. It's worse than before I was born, it's almost freeing then.

I scrounge up, which really means steal, enough cash to stay in a reasonable hotel. Not nice enough that they would require ID. But I've slept rough for days on end before so anything that isn't a park bench, doorway, or dumpster suits me fine.

Listings in the paper gave me an idea of how to spend my time. An opportunity I have done my best to take whenever I can. As long as I can find something appropriately smart to wear.

I do and I enter the theater and mill around in the foyer, clutching my ticket. Really I need to get seated, relax, as soon as possible. 

But I hear a familiar sound and turn to see Héloïse's mother mid-chuckle. I step away quickly, but keep watching. Lucille stands out in a crowd. 

Next to her a tall, severe man. I've seen Philip's photos at the house, I would recognize him anywhere even though I never met him in my present. Never in my present, but I've stood across from him like this before. I did it last year though I don't know when it was for him, whether it has happened or not. And I will do it again. We will collide. 

So when he looks up, looks right at me, I let him. I let him take a good look. He doesn't recognize me, there's nothing there so I slip away.

In the theater I see Lucille and Philip up in their box, I see my parents on the stage. And I cry, silent and steady, for all of us. 

...

Marianne has been gone for two days and when I get home my heart lifts. The stereo is playing, a light is on, the signs I long for. I drop my satchel and hurry into the living room, already a little surprised she hasn't come to me. "Marianne!"

She does not appear. Halfway between the living room and the kitchen is a pile of her clothes and a smashed teacup.

She's been traveling more and more. Every few days, plus periods of every day, now she has come and gone in the same day. Without my even getting to see her, without her getting the chance to rest. 

I get take-out for two and put hers in the fridge, just in case. I'll have it tomorrow if she isn't back. Go to bed. 

Then she is back, a crash on the floor and I am instantly awake, alert. As I move to the edge of the bed I can hear her shaking, her limbs knocking on the floor. At first, I think she's having a fit, which is new, but when I'm beside her, touching her, she's ice cold. I drag the duvet off the bed and cover her, put my hand to her frozen cheek. "I'm here, you're home, it's alright," and go to phone an ambulance, unlock the door and lie down next to her. 

...

Héloïse's voice is drawing my consciousness in. I cling to it, let it pull me up out of the darkness. Opening my eyes is an assault, but worthwhile because there she is, book balanced against my thigh that's covered with a blue hospital blanket, holding my hand up against her cheek, reading to me.

"Hello," I say, trying to be nonchalant but my voice rasps like I've been raised from hell.

"Welcome back," she says, like she does, but this time it's different. She kisses my hand and I want so desperately to kiss her, but she's putting a cup to my lips instead. 

"How long?"

"A few hours," she says quickly. "Then two days here."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be silly," she instructs. She is in business mode. She is in business mode because she was scared. "I have to tell the nurse you're awake." She pauses in the doorway. " _Please_ don't go anywhere."

...

I have to keep her here. If she travels now... She's so weak and ill and I can't think about it. I instruct Kendrick that the lights need to be kept low, the machines muted. Calm must reign. There's not much we can do, but I will do what I can. 

Even when she's sleeping I'm there. Sophie tries to get me to go home, Marianne tries to get me to go home, but I can't. 

"Where were you?" Eventually, I manage to ask it.

"I don't know. Well, wintertime." She tries to smile.

What I need to know, really, is what went wrong. I can't ask it. I can't joke around either.

"Maybe I hit my head," she says anyway. Pondering, unsure, her eyes are searching for the memory. "I'm not sure. But I could hardly move. And it was so cold."

Then I don't want to know any more. I just hold her tighter.

I don't want to know, but I think about it all the time. Her traveling into the ocean, onto a highway, in front of a train. Lost in the forest, trapped in a building, not traveling back for days until she dies of exposure or dehydration first. And would I even know? She'd just be gone, I'd be waiting the rest of my life for her to come back, but she never would. 

...

When I wake up, I'm glad Héloïse isn't there. "Oh, hey," Sophie says. "Héloïse just went home for a few hours."

"Good," I say. "She needs a break." It kills me to see her brave, tired face here all the time.

"Yeah, well, you try telling her that," and we smile, united in our inability to get Héloïse to do anything. 

"How are you?"

Sophie laughs at the question. "Oh, great, except one of my best friends has been in hospital for a week."

"She'll be freed up again soon," I say, but Sophie looks alarmed. I explain, "When I'm home, she won't need to worry so much, she'll be able to hang out with you."

"I mean you."

I did not know that. Héloïse is my best friend, my partner, my whole world. That seems embarrassing though so I do consider Sophie to be my best friend too, sort of by default of her being Héloïse's. But Sophie is a gregarious soul with lots of friends and I did not know she thought of me like that. 

"I'm fine."

"You sure don't look it."

I laugh. 

"See, now you want Héloïse back."

"She's not much nicer," I say. "Thank you for being here."

"Pleasure," Sophie smiles. 

"Thank you for looking after Héloïse. I wanted to..." I try to find the words.

"Marianne..." and Sophie tries to stop me. 

"I know you will look after her, that you always have, long before me, and I can't tell you how much that helps."

"As much as she will let me."

"That's very true," and we find smiles again for a moment. 

"There was never anyone before you," Sophie says quietly. "I saw it, as soon as you got here. She was a whole new person. She tried not to, but she was always waiting for you."

"Don't let her, after," I say. "Please, Sophie." 

"Don't let there be an after," she replies. And I wish it were as simple as that. 

Then Héloïse is in the doorway looking at me, smiling at me, and I am overflowing with love for her. I don't want to leave her, I never want to leave her. But I will.

...

The thing is, I know. I know how it happens, I know when it happens. Bits and pieces, little clues dropping in to place. I knew it was getting close, I could feel it in my body, I could see it in the mirror. I knew other people were thinking the same thing. That I was fading away. 

Then there was the time I was in the meadow. I'm 40, but I don't know the date it was there, though I have a rough idea. Héloïse wasn't there. It's not a date in the notebook. It was barely dawn. 

I was pulling on the raincoat when I saw a figure coming down from the house and, at first, I assumed it was Héloïse, but I squint and quickly realize it's not. They are dressed in an orange hunting vest, gun over their shoulder. I duck into the woods behind, but they are heading this way so I started skirting across, thinking to double back to the house behind them, once they have passed. 

Until I heard the noise, the strange snapping sound heralding my arrival, right there in the meadow. An exclamation, the crack of a gunshot. Someone cried out, in pain. I burst from the cover of the trees and across from me was Héloïse's father, gun raised. In between us, a pool of blood. He looked at me with a horror I can detect even at this distance. 

I travel back home. Héloïse is sleeping and I crawl into bed next to her. Without waking she senses me, moves closer, nuzzles against me and I can't cry for fear of waking her. 

The meadow isn't important because it's where I meet Héloïse. The meadow is important because I think it's where I die. 

Another time I travel into the future and find myself on the balcony of the apartment, it's dark and cold and there are fireworks going off. I haul myself to my feet and go to open the door, but stop. Inside there are lots of people, our family and friends. In the center of all that I am on the floor, bleeding. 

Héloïse is holding me. All of a sudden she looks up, right at me. The pain in her eyes, the frozen horror on her face. She shakes her head. No. It's done. It's over. She tells me she loves me. I disappear.

No, wait. The meadow is important because of Héloïse. I refuse to let anything else overshadow that. The most important thing I ever did there was be with her, spend her childhood with her. It doesn't matter, how it ends. What matters is the time, the care, the love. The most important parts. 

...

Marianne is discharged from the hospital and I take two weeks off work. Knowing Marianne has been in hospital, knowing how she has been in general, everyone understands, or thinks they do. I bring her home, holding her up as we cross the threshold, and tuck her into bed. 

"We should go away," Marianne says, smiling sleepily.

"OK," I agree. Because I will agree to anything she wants right now. "Where?" 

We don't really go away. We take our vacations here, at home. Marianne won't get on a plane for fear not so much of traveling off it, but failing to travel back _on_ and being dumped 35,000ft in the air. Which, as soon as she said it, terrified me too. Nor is she a fan of car journeys so long ones seem cruel. 

And then, if she traveled while we were away there'd be no way of knowing if she would return before the holiday was over. Or if she did return it might be back to the apartment in Paris. And worrying about all those things only makes the traveling more likely. So we stay, or we go to my mother's. 

"It's OK if you don't want to..." she starts. Which means she is going to suggest my mother's. And I did just say that I would agree to anything she wants. 

"I'll call her," I say, and kiss Marianne on the cheek. "I love you."

"I think you must." 

The thing is, I know. When Marianne comes to the meadow there's this window of her. The first time she went to the meadow she was thirty, so a while after we met. Mostly it was between thirty-five and forty, I'm not sure why. The few years she told me seemed impossible as a child. 2001? 2005? Just too far away. So I wasn't paying proper attention. 

But I look at her now and I know I never saw her any older. One time she told me she had been ill, she still looked ill. She looked like this. And I think that might have been her last trip there. 

Tellingly, the sort of sign one can choose to ignore, there hasn't been a visit from a future Marianne, dispensing stock tips and helping with the washing up, from beyond now either. Not that she has to come and see us. But the future, all of a sudden, starts to look like an empty void. I suppose as it must to everyone else, but I am unused to it. 

I had always thought, without reason, just blind and foolish childish hope, that there was a cure. Increasingly, the chilling realization has been creeping into my bones. She doesn't stop traveling because of a cure. 

I'm driving her back there, to my childhood home, to where I first met her. To where all this began, or concluded, I don't know. She's asleep in the passenger seat. Pale and drawn, but always with that little hint of a smile. I look at her sleeping and I think, Please don't go. Please don't leave me.


	6. Chapter 6

While we are away Héloïse fusses me constantly and I would love it if it weren't for the fact she's doing it because she's scared. 

"Are you drinking enough water?" She inspects the glass next to me. 

I am under approximately a dozen blankets in the sitting room. "I am awash."

"Do you need the bathroom?"

"Not if I have to dig myself out from under all this. I'm probably expelling it all in sweat instead."

She's on me instantly, the back of her hand to my forehead. 

"Not a fever," I say, overwhelmed and heartbroken at the concern on her face. "Can we go out, get some fresh air?"

"You're supposed to be relaxing, not pushing yourself." She's worried about me getting tired and traveling while I'm like this. I'm aware of the possibility, but also very aware that I need to be back on my feet, properly, for whenever I do travel because I'm in no fit state right now. 

"A little walk, my love, that's all." 

So we walk down to the meadow and I take her arm and she holds my arm onto her arm and it's a wonder we don't trip over each other. 

"Tell me if you get too cold," she says and I think how adorable she is. "Or if you get too tired," and I think how much I love her. "Or if you..." and I kiss her instead.

Which is pretty much how the whole visit goes. I behave myself, take things slow and we go for longer walks and sit outside on the patio, though I am still under a dozen blankets. I watch Lucille and Héloïse gardening and by the end of the first week I am down there in the dirt with them. In the meantime, I am plied with food that I do my best to eat, lots of naps, reading, I feel better and better, I take Dr. Kendrick's new concoction of pills, we throw everything we have at this. I still travel. 

...

I'm seventeen and according to the notebook Marianne is coming, but I am stuck upstairs having dinner. I finally extricate myself, run to the kitchen, seize tupperware boxes of leftovers and make my way down to the Reading Room where I knock four times on the door, our special knock. There's a weird shuffling noise and the door fails to open. I knock again and hear a groan. This is alarming. "Marianne," I say forcefully. 

I'm about to dash upstairs to my room for the key, which we only really need when she's locked herself in and travels back. Then there are footsteps and the door opens. "Oh, thank God," I say because she's fine. Her hair is mussed. "Were you asleep?"

"Sorry." She hugs her arms around herself. 

I come in and lock the door. "It's OK, if you are tired."

"I'm not," she lies as she yawns and goes back to sitting. "How are you?"

She doesn't just look tired, she looks totally worn out. She looks old. Not objectively old, but old for her. I think this might be the oldest I've ever seen her. 

"How are _you_?" I ask with no tact and she laughs at the insinuation. That makes her look better. I love when she laughs. Which, luckily for me, she does all the time. 

She puts her hand to her head. "I wasn't very well just recently. I'm fine now. Just a bit more tired than usual." 

"Are you seeing your doctor?" I sit down next to her.

"Yes," she smiles, "I am seeing my doctor, thank you. I'm fine, honestly." She pats at my hand. 

"What was wrong with you?"

"Héloïse, I'm fine. Nothing is wrong with me." She hates talking about herself, but it's all I want to do these days. 

I take her hand in both of mine. "What _was_ wrong with you?"

"I just caught a bug from traveling, that's all. Don't worry."

The thing is, and I don't tell her this because I know she would hate it, I worry about her a lot. She tells me funny things about time travel, but I know there are far less funny parts. By seventeen I understand the vulnerability of turning up at random points in time and space naked and alone. Not just that it is embarrassing, but potentially very dangerous. 

And she can't help it, but sometimes she comes here still carrying cuts and bruises from previous travels. Which she tries to hide, or, like with the black eye one time, turn into a funny story about falling out of a tree or whatever. Knowing she is lying to me twists in my stomach, but it's the best possible kind of lie, I decide. It must be, if Marianne will do it. 

"Let me read to you." I'm already on my feet looking for the perfect book. 

I toss the blanket to her and she has to scramble her way out from under it. She laughs, thinking I did it to be silly, but really it's that if I'd taken it and laid it over her nicely I would have done something actually silly, like kiss her. I pick up another cushion and throw that at her too. She returns fire, but I catch it easily and can see she's already out of breath. I slide a book from the shelf and return to her. 

She's still holding out against my suggestion she take a nap, sitting too upright. I add the cushion I'm holding and rearrange them, a low, round nest. She likes to curl, I know this. I point, frowning, and she does as she is told though she is laughing about it. I sit further down and start reading aloud and as she relaxes she unfurls a little, her feet up against my thigh. 

Before long she's asleep. I can hardly bear to look at her. I can't handle it, how vulnerable she looks, the way my heart beats to see her. I love her so much and there's nothing I can do about it apart from try to look after her in any little way I can. 

...

I'm back, heaving vomit all over the cold floor of the hall at Meadowlark. There's the sound of running steps and "Marianne!" and Héloïse is next to me, wrapping a blanket around me, pulling me into her arms. She searches me. "Are you alright? How do you feel?"

"How long?" I manage to ask.

"A few hours."

I feel exhausted, like I could just fall asleep here sitting on the floor. "I'm OK. I was here, with you."

"Oh, thank God," she mutters, pulling me closer. I want to stay here, forever, being held against her. She has other ideas, is asking if I can stand, talking about getting me to bed.

Somehow we manage it, I stagger and Héloïse hauls and we are up the stairs into the bathroom and then collapsing onto the bed. She pulls the covers over me, strokes my hair, cups my cheek. "What do you need? Food? More water? Shall I read to you?"

"You just were."

She smiles, she knows where I was. She leans over and kisses me gently. "That was all I wanted to do that evening."

"You were so sweet." I stroke her face, tuck her hair behind her ear. "I am so lucky."

She shakes her head in disbelief. About herself, about the situation, I don't know. But I am, I am so lucky. 

"I'll get you something to eat," she says. "You need to eat."

"I need you." I grasp at her shirt, try to tug her toward me. "Héloïse, I need _you_." 

She touches me and it makes me feel like my body belongs to me again. The lightest trailing of her fingers and I am ablaze. I need this. I need to feel connected, to myself, to her, to the world. She makes love to me as though I might break. Her hesitation is excruciating and exquisite and exactly what I need. Slow, soft, loving. As I ride the crest of the wave back down to earth she holds me in a tight hug for the longest time and I drift off to sleep in her arms.

... 

I watch Mama hold Marianne just that little bit longer than usual as we say goodbye. Kiss her, pat her on the cheek, look at her. I remember the standoffish way Mama first greeted Marianne. Now this. I try to be happy, grateful, but I know why. That Mama, grown fond, as I always knew she would, thinks she may never see Marianne again. 

After Mama hugs me, she gives me a look of such pity. I will not let this be what unites us finally. Marianne and I are not her and Papa. I will not be a widow, not that I would even have that, and the indignity burns me. Marianne and I love each other like my parents never did. I refuse to allow this to happen.

Tomorrow we will see Kendrick and we will make a plan, to end all this. 

Tomorrow, though, we get into the car to head to the hospital and we're five minutes away when Marianne puts her hand on mine, says, "Héloïse, I love you, I'm sorry," and I am driving a pile of clothes to her appointment instead. I swear and hit the horn, just for something to do. 

"Where's Marianne?" Kendrick asks when I arrive alone. 

"Who knows!" and I throw myself into the chair in front of his desk. 

"Ah. You know, I shouldn't really talk to you without her here."

I eyeball him. "I'd be sat right next to her anyway. And we can't wait potentially two weeks for her to turn up again."

"Is this the first time she's traveled since being in hospital?"

"No." She didn't for a while, but then she's gone several times since. Arriving back sick and exhausted and breaking my heart. 

He frowns. 

"She did well, while we were away. She seems stronger." She rallied. And then the traveling started again and took it all away, took her away. 

"Good, good," Kendrick says, distracted. He's looking through the papers on his desk. 

"New results?"

"Yes," he says, still absentminded. 

"Tell me."

"She's losing her sight, did she tell you that?"

"She just needs reading glasses, it happens to everyone." Not that she has told me this, no, but I see her struggling and am working on the gentle suggestions she needs to see an optometrist. She's going to look adorable in glasses though I doubt she will see it that way. And she can't take them with her. 

"It's not just that. Her kidneys, her... I don't think you understand what it is doing to her, on a cellular level."

"Don't you _dare_ tell me I don't understand." I am incandescent, part of me has been waiting for the opportunity to let rip. "When it's me who finds her in pools of blood and vomit. When it's me who cooks her meals she can't eat. When it's me who she smiles at and tells she's OK when she is so very clearly not." I'm not angry at him. Or with Marianne and her daily lies. I'm angry at this. 

Yet _this_ is what brought me Marianne in the first place and so even my anger at it cannot be pure and blinding. I can't even take comfort in that. 

"She's dying," I tell Kendrick. He knows, I can see it in the fear that flashes behind his eyes. But now he knows that I know. Does she know? She must. 

"Yes," he admits because he _also_ knows better than to bullshit me. Marianne has told me he is scared of me and she did it intending I would be gentler with him, but she does not see that sometimes you need people to be scared of you. I love her for that. 

"And what are you doing about it?"

He pinches his nose. "Trying to make her comfortable. I'd like to reduce the traveling. Give her as much quality time here in the present as I can. But we need time that we just don't have." 

"But a cure?"

"There is no cure, Héloïse. Not for Marianne."

I struggle past this. "It's what you've been working on."

"It was. It is, in a way. We've been working on understanding the condition, sequencing her DNA, the experiments with the mice, it's all going very well. But these things take time. It's... well, it's a cure for other people now. Not for time travel, obviously, not that we know of, but there are implications for many other illnesses." 

The fact I have a reputation to keep up in front of Kendrick is the only thing holding me together right now. "Listen," I say. "I don't care what bleeding heart nonsense she gives you, you don't stop trying to fix her."

"She wants to spend the time she has left helping other people. Being with you."

"Well of course she does," I snap. "She's Marianne. The job of the rest of us is to do it anyway." But he said she knew, the time she has left. I swallow hard. "Does she know when?"

He shakes his head. "She told me she doesn't, but I think she does. She talks like she does." 

Marianne, the absolute hypocrite, refusing to divulge anyone else's future, has gone poking around in her own and for a white hot second I am absolutely furious with her. Until it is washed away with my own pain and the sadness that she has been carrying this with her so I can't even rouse myself to anger about her not telling me. 

"But to be practical, Héloïse..." he continues and I am nothing if not practical, even as the love of my life is dying, "the way she is deteriorating, it can't be more than months."

It hits me like a freezing wave. Too soon, my brain screams, as if any time would not be too soon. 

"And that's assuming we don't have another situation like the hypothermia." He slams his pen down on the desk. He loves her too, I realize. She isn't a science project to him. He too has been charmed.

"But what's the plan?" I am flailing, drowning, looking for something to cling to. 

"We'll keep working on the meds, make things easier if we can. But Héloïse, I think you have to accept..." 

I don't even say goodbye. I just crash out of there in a fury.

...

I've only been away a few hours, huddled in the stairwell of an office block somewhere, when I'm back on a cold, tiled floor. I'd be sick if there was anything left in me, I just retch unattractively and recognize where I am as I do so. My father's kitchen. And there he is, standing by the open refrigerator, staring at me.

"Hi Dad."

"Hi honey."

He helps me up and to the couch. I'm too achy and exhausted to care about my modesty or anything much at all. 

"Shall I get you some clothes?" He fetches me a pile of clothes from my room, looking at the floor. "You need something to eat now, right?"

"I'm OK, thanks."

Once I'm dressed he sits next to me. "I'm not sure you are."

I try very hard not to cry. "It will be OK. But, you know, if anything happens to me..." If, if if. When. "Héloïse will always be here for you. And Alicia." He and Alicia are sobriety buddies. This is something I have tried very hard not to think about. What gets left behind. "You'll be OK."

He puts his arms around me. After a minute he coughs, wipes his eyes. "I'd best give Héloïse a call. You need to get home."

When she arrives she hugs him, but is watching me over his shoulder. Released, she comes to me slowly. I am apprehensive. She takes a deep breath, frowns, opens her mouth. "I love you."

I'm convinced that's not all, but it's everything. "I love you too."

On the way out the door, I pause. "When did you know?" I ask him. 

"I'm not sure I do now," he says. 

"We'll talk, soon," I promise and Héloïse nods next to me. She will help. She always helps. 

...

I find Marianne sat at my desk, rooting around. "What are you up to?"

She flusters, looking guilty. "I just..." She's struggling to lie to me. Sighs, "I wrote some things down for you."

Things. I know what she means, why she was trying to secret it away without me knowing. Something for me to find, after. Putting her affairs in order. I come over, take the envelope from her.

"You don't have to look at it now."

"Of course I'm going to look at it now. Have you ever known me to have any patience?"

She smiles. "No."

I stroke her cheek. "Especially not for something I won't need to see for oh, I don't know, another fifty years _at least_."

She smiles again and it's as close to exasperated with me that she can get. 

I flick through. Her will, funeral arrangements, copies of all her investments, deeds. All of which I already have. Some of this writing, about traveling, her adventures. Stock tips, of course, that go on for a decade. I didn't know she'd gone that far out. A page with dates and lottery numbers a few times a year for the same. I hold it up to her, eyebrow raised. 

"In case you fancy a yacht," she says. 

It's too much. I wrap my arms around her shoulders, cradle her against me, kiss her hair. 

"Do you know when?" I ask her, finally brave enough. 

She sighs into me, accepting that I know. "I didn't go looking. But I've seen things, traveled there. The gravity of big events and I guess that's a pretty big one." 

I kneel down in front of her, take her hands. She smiles, making light. 

She'd told me she didn't want to know, wouldn't try to find out, which she so easily could. As long as that was true then the date was still out there spinning like a slot machine, yet to settle, yet to be determined into anything. It meant we still had a chance.

I feel guilty for thinking she had changed her mind on that, at least without telling me. Because of course she would stumble on clues and hints, somewhere out there in the messy ocean of time. 

"You don't have to be alone with this. Tell me. Every day I am in pieces thinking it might be the last."

"That's how everyone lives," she says quietly, stroking my hair. "You never know, maybe you get hit by a bus before I go."

"I wish," I mutter darkly and she knows me well enough to know what I mean.

"You don't get hit by a bus," she says. "Just to be clear." News of the future, right when I don't want it. "Do you really think it would help?"

The question gets proper thought. Is this simply morbid curiosity? No, it's not. I am torn apart every time I leave her, every time she leaves, not knowing if that was it, if I will ever see her again. 

But would knowing help? Who's to say that, knowing, I wouldn't simply be consumed with the creeping dread of the day getting closer and ruin all those in the interim anyway. I've done it before. 

Ideally, I could relax in the days before, enjoy them properly, but couldn't I learn to do that anyway? Like she said, any day could be my last and I don't walk around in a panic about it. She doesn't, on my behalf. Civilisation wouldn't function if we all did. So maybe I should accept the uncertainty, that everyone else has, and live with it.

It's the normality she tries to give me. But all this is so far from normal. 

"A hint?" I ask. 

This she seems happy with. "We've got the rest of the year." And I immediately start crying. 

... 

We're walking down the road and I feel it, the lightheadedness. "I love you," I say quickly to Héloïse and have enough time to see the anguish cloud her face, even as she tries to smile and starts to tell me she loves me too. 

I'm in grass and I hope to goodness it's the meadow, I just want to be with her, please, I just want to be with her. Everything hurts, but I have to move. As soon as I do I am sick and when I stop I get a good look around.

No, I don't want to be with her. Not like this. 

Trees, grass, but not the meadow. I crawl on my hands and knees to the closest tree and huddle there, scanning the area. A park, no, not _a_ park, _the_ park, _our_ park. I recognize the path closest to me. A little way down is a café and I do my best to move from tree to tree taking cover and making my way along. I attack the café from the rear, a door is open and I grab a coat hanging just inside. It comes to my knees and it will have to do. 

Tentatively I look out to the front of the building. I try to figure out the date from what people are wearing. Late 80s? Early 90s? That's close enough, a decade will do. 80s I can get away with just a trench coat as 'fashion' whereas in the 50s it will get you arrested. This means I could check the date, to be sure, and find Héloïse or myself. But this last year I haven't. I haven't wanted either of them to see me like this. I've stayed away, gone almost feral, in an attempt to hide this future from them. 

You need to eat, I hear Héloïse's voice. So I rummage in the dumpster, which does not exactly promote an appetite, and find a partial pizza. I force one slice down. It will have to do, I tell her.

I should move on, find some real clothes, but I don't have the energy. When I was young, hell, when I was young, I'm forty-three for crying out loud, I'm not even old. When I was _younger_ I would be off, running from the police, smashing windows and hopping through in search of clothes, jumping on and off Metro trains in the nude. Now I just want to have a nap. A very long nap. 

I head to the lake, but not all the way there. I sit up the slope under a tree. It's still a nice view, but it's less of a view of me for everyone else. It's getting dark so there aren't that many people. I should have found more clothes, it's a balmy evening, but I'm starting to shiver. 

Two figures are making their slow, meandering way along the path circumnavigating the lake. They aren't going to spot me, they are entranced. It makes me smile. Then they stop, still some distance away, but right in front of me. I'm not afraid of them seeing me now. I know we don't. 

Fifteen years ago, August 6 1991. I watch them and I remember, I remember how everything changed, everything started. I could go down there now, except I know I can't because I didn't. But if I could. To explain to them what they are getting themselves into. Well, Marianne down there, I'm not getting myself into anything, I'm already more than halfway through. But Héloïse... Héloïse has a chance to get out still. Can she change her fate? Make that choice? Or can the universe not allow it because everything would unravel, because we are already too entwined? 

How can I want to stop this, though? There we are, at the beginning of something wonderful, that changed everything. Héloïse has a choice. She could walk away, even if she loved me, she could walk away. She chose not to, every day she chooses me. 

Fifteen years is not enough time. It's so much time, but no amount of time is enough to love Héloïse. 

...

I'm shelving books in the special collections section that, thankfully, is closed to the public, when I hear the strange snapping noise I know so well. I head towards it, "Marianne?"

"Oh, hello!" She is sitting in her usual position, her legs drawn up to her chest, ankles crossed, but she gets up, unconcerned and easily, at the sight of me. 

I look at her. She must be at least five years younger than me and oh God she looks good, healthy, vital. There are so many things I want to say to her. But what I do say is, "It's a good thing I volunteered to shelve the returns today. Where have you come from?"

"September 2000. Where am I?"

"October 2006."

"Would you look at that, I came six years through time to visit you and in rush hour traffic too." 

"And that would be incredibly sweet if you weren't nude and I didn't have a meeting in forty-five minutes." 

"Forty-five minutes of nudity is _more_ than enough time." She leans against the shelves. 

I lean too, lost in gazing at her. "I can't believe I'm going to say no to this, but I am." 

She smiles. "Fine, I'll meet you afterward and take you to lunch?" 

I sneak her to the staff toilets and go to fetch her some clothes from the office. While I'm there I call Marianne. I can have nude time with any of her, that's not really the issue. Something about this feels different and I need to talk to her. 

"Is everything alright?" she asks, because the phone call is unusual. I'm half surprised, though very glad, she's there to pick up. 

"Fine, it's just, well, _someone_ turned up naked in the stacks just now, trying to seduce me."

She laughs. "Lucky you."

I pause a moment. "I won't if you don't want me to."

"Of course I want you to. I'm the one doing the seducing."

"Vixen," I mutter.

"Don't tell her," Marianne says. "About me. I know you don't. But..." 

I know what she means, understand her concern, instantly. "I wouldn't."

"Go," she says. "Enjoy your date."

So I bring Marianne some clothes to change into, she gets dressed, we get at least partially naked again immediately after. 

Previously I have left a visiting Marianne in the main library while I have a meeting or finish up work, but all the staff here know her, many have visited her recently, they all think they know she is ill with something. Matt and Caroline have gently tried to start conversations with me about it. So they can't see this Marianne, all shining and strong, and she can't see them either, for being alerted through questions. So I send her off to the restaurant and she doesn't seem to see anything suspicious in this. 

She's there when I arrive, stands to greet me, helps me with my coat. 

I sit and I'm staring at her again, I can't help it. "Wouldn't you rather be doing something more fun with your future? We can have lunch anytime."

She looks, God bless her, completely confused by the concept. "What would I rather be doing than having lunch with you? I miss so much life with you, when I'm traveling, that if I'm traveling and get the chance to be with you I'm going to take it."

She doesn't deserve this, she's too good and I have to try very hard not to just start weeping at the injustice of it all. 

"Do you... want to go home?" she asks, with clear suggestion in her eyebrows. 

It makes me laugh, I need to laugh, instead. "No, we don't know how long you have, let's not spend it on the Metro."

We eat and go for a walk around the city, just to see how far we can get. Until, inevitably, she pulls me aside, kisses me, tells me she loves me and is gone. I crouch down to pick up her clothes and find I am crying and can't stop. 

That evening, the minute the door closes Marianne is there in the hall, smiling, taking my satchel, helping me with my coat, kissing me. Everything so heartbreakingly familiar. She makes me a cup of tea and I ask about her day and she points at the pile of books on the coffee table. "Making good progress."

"I'm going to quit my job," I say, in a rush, once she is sat down next to me.

"Don't do that," she says gently. 

"Why am I there every day when I should be with you?"

"Because it's who you are and you love it."

"I love _you_."

"And I don't doubt that. You'd only be sat about half the time, more than half the time, while I traveled. You know I don't want you waiting. I just want... and I know this is silly, but I want things to be as normal as possible."

Which is why she never bought a lottery ticket. Why she stuck so closely to the no-future rule with me, even when it hurt. Why she didn't tell me, for years, that the end was coming. As normal as possible, even though so little is. 

We broker a compromise. More lunches, I will come home or she will come to me if she can manage it. We make the most of the time we have. 

...

Because it turns out, when Marianne said we had the rest of the year, she was being very literal. 

I plan a bit of a New Year's Eve party and invite some people. Quite a lot of people. I want to do something, I can't explain the impulse. I know it's not going to be a happy new year and I can't bear to let the old one go. So perhaps I need other people there to carry me over the line and into 2007 where I have no desire to be. Perhaps it's that I know being in company will keep my emotions in check.

Certainly I want Marianne to have a nice time, to fill her up with experiences and happiness and love. I want to show her off, too. It's not like everyone doesn't know something is happening. Some people here know about the time traveling and others at least know that something very odd goes on with my wonderful, unpredictable nudist. Everyone knows, thinks they know, that she is ill, think we're just not talking about it. 

Gradually, throughout the evening, I become aware that Marianne is on the balcony a lot, with various people. She pops in and fetches them. Her father, Alicia. It's only when Sophie comes back in after her audience and is crying that with a horrible certainty I know Marianne is saying her goodbyes. Subtly, gently, no doubt. But now, tonight. 

Sophie makes a beeline over to me and hugs me tightly. I am limp in her grasp. "I love her so much," she whispers fiercely.

My arms find her back and I remember to breathe. "Did you tell her?"

Sophie nods into me. 

"Good." 

Inside, people are dancing and drinking and it's a great party by any standards. I ought to be proud of myself. Marianne comes in through the back door and I look at her across the room. She normally avoids parties. Too loud with music and chatter, too hot and crowded. But she gave me this. She didn't want me to be alone, after.

She's leaning heavily against the door and finds my gaze. She smiles and I am lifted up by it, every fiber of my being vibrates with love for her. 

When I go to her she wraps an arm around me, shifts her weight from the door to me. "It's a great party," she says and she is proud of me, kisses my temple. I melt into her. We stand for a moment looking at our friends and family, in our home. 

"Come sit with me?"

We shuffle to the bench and sit, covering ourselves up with a blanket. The cold air stings my face, but it is good. I'm worried she will get too cold, but she seems fine, has been out here most of the evening anyway. 

She puts her head on my shoulder and I press my nose into her hair, breathe deeply, kiss the top of her head. Try to hold onto this. She's heavy, drowsy, so I slide her down into my lap. She looks up at me, smiling. She is happy, to be here, now, and I try to be happy too, for her, for the moment. I stroke her hair, trace her eyebrows and her nose and her lips and every part of the face that I have known and loved for thirty-seven glorious years. 

"I'm sorry," she says. There are tears in the corners of her eyes. 

"You never needed to be sorry," I say. "You made my life extraordinary and I am so grateful."

She takes my hand and kisses it. "Thank you, for everything." I can feel her shaking. 

Inside the countdown begins. "Ten, nine - Where's Héloïse and Marianne?" someone calls, but time waits for no one and the shouting continues. "Eight, seven, six..." Fireworks have already started somewhere. I can only look at Marianne as she looks back up at me. "Five, four, three..." 

"I'll be in the living room, soon," she says. "Don't be afraid."

"Two, one..."

"Kiss me."

"Happy New Year!" 

I kiss her, my hands slipping round the back of her neck, holding her to me. I kiss her with everything I have and she strains into me and is gone. 

For a moment I am stunned, my whole world caves in on itself and I can't move, but I don't know how long we have so I scoop up the blanket, still warm from her, her clothes inside it, and go into the house. 

"Héloïse, there you are!" someone calls and the party is all merriment and glasses being replenished.

"Switch off the music!" I snap. "Kendrick, call an ambulance."

The music goes off and everyone is looking at me. Sophie moves to me. "I need the medical kit," I tell her. I hear Kendrick on the phone. Richard is stood right there, I tell Alicia to get him out of here, in fact, everyone needs to get out of here.

"What's happened?" Kendrick asks, hand over his cell, relaying information. 

I am poised, ready, completely unprepared. "I don't know." 

Moments, moments pass. I try to hold myself together. Then the snapping sound as a naked and bleeding Marianne materializes out of the air in the middle of the room. I am next to her in an instant and oh God there is so much blood. I throw the blanket over her and take her in my arms, into my lap, just as we were moments ago on the balcony. She looks up at me. "I'm here, you're home," I tell her. 

"I am home," she says. 

Sophie has the first aid kit and pulls out the heavy-duty stuff, the almost military-level quickclot, gauze, bandages. 

"Look at me," I demand of Marianne. "We are changing the future, OK?" She can't change her past, but this is my future. 

Something, some instinct, makes me look up. Stood naked on the other side of the balcony door is Marianne. Her hands on the glass, watching. In my arms, she is falling unconscious. I shake my head at the Marianne outside. No. Do not think it. It is not going to happen. I will not let it happen. I will not let you go. Then I mouth, "I love you," and she is gone.

"I love you," Marianne mumbles. "Always and everywhere."

"I love you too. Here. Now," I urge her. 

Then I hear sirens. Kendrick goes to the door, still on the phone. "Marianne," I say, but she has drifted away. 

The paramedics bustle in, all industry and efficiency. They relieve Sophie from where she is heroically plugging the hole in Marianne's stomach.

Kendrick pulls me away and I physically fight him to stay by Marianne's side. An oxygen mask on and they hoist her onto a gurney. He's talking to one of the paramedics and I am back at her side as they take her to the ambulance.

We pass people, all these worried faces, people that I love, but can't think about right now.

"I'll be right behind you," Sophie says, squeezing my arm and heading down the street.

I get into the back of the ambulance with Kendrick. The paramedic is next to Marianne, I'm by her feet, but I am holding her in my sights and I am not going to let go. Willing her on. There's a drip and a monitor and after a few minutes of driving she starts shaking and when she stops the beeps stop, solidify, and there are compressions and the pumping of air and I am not letting go. Not of her, not of the future.

Into the hospital and we are pushed aside as she is wheeled away. This is the worst part. I can hold her in my arms as she bleeds to death and remain calm, because I must. But I cannot bear to have her taken away like this, to have nothing to do, nothing to focus on. She is always being taken away from me like this. To where I cannot help her, do not know if she is safe, have to wait helplessly for her to be delivered back to me.

Today I am not waiting alone. Kendrick is here, Sophie arrives, then Richard and Alicia. We sit together, well, they sit, I mostly pace, until Sophie begs me to stop. 

A doctor approaches. Everything until now has felt like it was happening underwater. Slow, muffled, the adrenalin pumping through me trying to filter out the unnecessary. Fight or flight and I am here to fight. He's talking, I do my best to concentrate. Sophie grabs me in a side hug, sobbing. Alicia and Richard are holding onto each other.

"We've taken her upstairs," he's concluding. "You should be able to see her soon."

...

The plan falls into place. Marianne is unconscious at first anyway so Kendrick goes straight in with big doses. Hitting it hard. The sort of doses that would have incapacitated her before. If she travels now, even without the drugs, there is no hope anyway. But if she doesn't, if we keep her sedated, if the drugs get the chance to build up in her system, day after day... It's the only chance we have. 

I hold onto her, twenty-four hours a day, I physically will not let her go. I am _this close_ to demanding they fit me with a catheter. Instead, I hand her over to someone, threatening them with fire and brimstone, and am back within minutes. We have to keep her here. There is no other option. 

Over the weeks the equipment starts to be taken away, she needs less and less and while this is wonderful, she is healing, it is more precarious. It's like it was weighing her down, holding her here. Now I have to, I will hold her here with sheer force of will. We pass milestones. She hasn't gone this long without traveling since I knew her. Then since she was a teenager. The weeks tick by. Agonizing, but miraculous. I allow myself to hope and it hurts, it is terrifying, but I allow it. 

...

I can hear Héloïse. There are moments when I float close enough to the surface that I can hear her voice. Sometimes she's reading to me, our favorite books, from the meadow, from the Reading Room, from the couch in the apartment. Sometimes she's talking to me. I hear her laugh, cry, tell me she loves me. Sometimes it's just her breathing, sleeping beside me. But I can't get to her. 

Until one time, I don't know when, hours, days, weeks, I don't know anymore, time has lost all meaning and that is unsettling to me, I hear other things. I hear her, talking to someone else. I hear doors closing, I hear birds, I hear the rest of the world. 

I find I can move. Only a little, a squirm of some sort, a stretch of muscles I can barely feel. 

"Here she comes," someone says.

I feel movement next to me. Then Héloïse, "Marianne, sweetheart, my love. It's OK, I'm here, you're alright." She coaxes me through it, until I open my eyes and there she is.

She's frowning, until she's not, she's holding my hands and kissing them and there are tears. "Welcome back," she says and I try to reach for her, but everything is stiff. She reassures me over and over, touching me, stroking me. She shushes the doctor when he tries to speak and I want to laugh, but it just comes across as a strange shaking. She looks alarmed for a moment, but realizes, smiles at me, conspiratorial.

Everything feels strange. Apart from her hands on me.

"You want to know how long?" she asks and I think I sort of manage a nod. "Three months," she says lightly, "you haven't traveled for three months. I think maybe..." but her head drops to my lap and she's crying. I manage to flex my fingers against her, her face, her hair, which makes her sob all the more.

I sleep for a while, real sleep, and when I wake up she's still there and my dad too. He squeezes my hand. I listen to them talking.

Which is how things progress, slowly, but surely. I sleep, I wake, Héloïse is there, a little bit more of me comes back each time. 

I have no idea how long any of this takes and I don't care. I graduate to water, to being able to say her name, to telling her I love her, to real food, to sitting up myself, to wiggling my toes. More visitors come. Héloïse is always there.

Late one night she lies next to me on the bed, stroking me up and down as far as she can reach. 

"I thought it was over," I say quietly.

"We can't ever know, how things will turn out."

"I'm sorry."

"No more of that," she says as she kisses me. 

...

There's physical therapy to do, Marianne has to get stronger, there are still hurdles. She clears them all, she never gives up no matter how frustrating and difficult, she's amazing.

We go home, her arm around me and I kiss her against the door. No time to waste. Even though we have time, now. We have so much time. We don't waste a second of it. 

I feed her up, there are lots of naps, reading, walks, she gets better and better. We throw everything we have at this. She doesn't travel. 

She starts working again. She makes her deadlines, she's here when clients call, she finally gets to see her work in magazines, on covers, there's talk of entering exhibitions. A career she had almost given up on and I think I could burst with pride. 

She's warm against me in bed, she holds herself over me on strong arms, holds _me_ in strong arms. We walk for hours like we used to, she twirls me around and kisses me and it doesn't matter, now, if anyone is looking. We made it to the future. 

There is a careful regime of drugs and we don't take any unnecessary risks. She and Kendrick have their time traveling mice and their little projects they are working on. She needs glasses and, as predicted, looks adorable. She's at the other end of the sofa now, glasses on, nose tucked into the cardigan, reading. I ask her if she knew what seventeen-year-old Héloïse got up to with her cardigan. Her face the picture of innocence. So I tell her and she laughs and laughs. 

It's the end of my wonderful, unpredictable nudist's time traveling adventures. An end to the fear and the pain and the loneliness and the waiting. And it's the beginning of everything else.


End file.
